The Ongoing Saga of the phpBB3 Gamer Site - Christmas Day 2006 - a thriving gamer community with thousands of members was left out in the cold when the creators of their planet, a custom built php forums application, disappeared. It had disappeared before, but it always came back, eventually. We suspected at Thanksgiving that the next time it vanished, it could very well be forever.

I'll never forget how after being approached by a team member Christmas week, that perhaps I, Doc, should build a new forums site, for free of course. PlanetThinkTanks2.com was being built/dontated by me (doh) just as the original planet went missing. I used phpBB2.

The first six months on a crappy shared hosted server proved time consuming due to the site being compromised constantly. The site is heavily modified with arcades, galleries, events, etc. The dawn of phpBB3 proved to resolve most of this, but it is always a major concern when one modifies the core application code in order to be fruitful.

Skipping ahead to 2010 and Joomla!, as I work on projects for others, I keep little planetthinktanks2 in the back of mind, hoping that one day, before the community dies off completely from lack of exposure and user friendliness, that I will one day get the perfect marriage in Joomla! of a full featured forums suite combined with a full featured social networking suite, all integrated and playing nicely inside the Joomla! core application.

We need an events manager, a calendar, a gallery, a repository, a glossary, a help desk, custom groups, ACL, flash arcade, bonus forum odds and ends like banning, points, mass mail, the list is massive, but I don't think uncommon for those wishing to build a community of your choosing.

Six months ago we made a big push, a team was assembled to assist me and most of the core user data is actually sitting nice inside Joomla! This leaves the flash arcade and the actual forum board to deal with at this point, other then template issues, one would think it a breeze. I say eek! to that.

Rokbridge
Well....you pretty much need the rest of the application that you don't get when you get the FREE bridge to make it look right. Even with the free bridge there's no nice playing going on between the 2 templates. The server seemed to crawl supporting both applications at once inside an iframe. To menu link to it from Joomla! you need a matching template or construct one to match. Spent lots of time with it though, just didn't learn anything new except I'd need money to make it look right. Hopefully with that money would come lots of template support, and I hear they have a new release of the template "connector" for the new Gantry system.

Kunena
Met these folks at JDay Vegas 2009. Nice guys, enthusiastic about their code. I have tried to go with that flow and installed Kunena here at Joomla-Webmasters.com. It serves it's purpose if you don't need banning, or animated user gifs. Born out of the ashes of fireboard, if you work in Kunena be warned. I'd go as far as to say it's not ready for prime time.  Not from a mechanical forum in front of you point of view, it does that just fine. Behind the scenes you will find an integrated template structure. This means exactly that every upgrade of the project, you need a new template IN THAT VERSION. Who wants to go through a 4,000 line CSS file and about 50 .php and html files EVERYTIME the application is updated? Even the pro Kunena template clubs are 1-3 releases behind the current version. In a nutshell, you have new application and no templates. Yet...it's being rebuilt with this core "failure" in mind. I don't expect to see anyone hanging on to it until it's planned v2+ releases. It's still free, for now.

JomSocial
Isn't a forum board, it's a social networking suite of applications. To use it alone in most environments may create a disjointed user feeling, such as, "where's the beef?"

Community Builder
See JomSocial description above.

On to Plan B
My new approach is to install a clean phpBB3 in a folder inside Joomla! Utilize 2 separate databases and install jfusion. The biggest task here should be extracting and migrate only the data I need to come over, so I can close all the holes and vulnerabilities created by modifying the phpBB3 core in days gone by.

jfusion.org if you need a bridge, that isn't a bridge, inside Joomla. Available for many current internet applications.

Just tried this code in the head of a DHTML script, supposed to fix IE8:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

It locked up the DHTML animation I was running, and made the browser run slower, if you can imagine that. Have I mentioned today how much I despise IE browsers? Probably, but don't plan on writing for a 3rd, Chrome. I'll give Chrome 2 things: ease of use and speed.

JomComment and CSS styles - No, the checkboxes won't work with your RT template's CSS out of the box due to the fact that the label tags are improperly spanned and class checkbox is missing. Wonder why they're not using any JText:: formatting, too...curious, hmm.

This will not get you working checkboxes:

‹label class="agree">‹input id="jc_agree" name="jc_agree" type="checkbox" />_JC_TPL_AGREE_TERMS ‹a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="jax.call('jomcomment','jcxShowTerms');return false;">_JC_TPL_LINK_TERMS

this will...

‹input id="jc_agree" class="checkbox" name="jc_agree" type="checkbox" />‹label class="agree">
_JC_TPL_AGREE_TERMS ‹a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="jax.call('jomcomment','jcxShowTerms');return false;">_JC_TPL_LINK_TERMS

Now, the preformatted rokchecks will play nice with the css.

Try it!

_JC_TPL_AGREE_TERMS _JC_TPL_LINK_TERMS

_JC_TPL_AGREE_TERMS _JC_TPL_LINK_TERMS