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.

Many possible uses for this type of treatment, just thought I'd share a sample from http://textorizer.whatfettle.com

I've had a couple requests since modifying Joomla-Webmasters.com's interface so that it has a cohesive elemental feel; people wondering how I managed the flow of all the form's input boxes, radios, and check boxes to work with the main template's javascript and css styling. Well, my friends, it's not that hard, but it is very time consuming. In fact, I found a couple more form views tonight that I had not "hit" yet. Happy to report they are all harmonious now. :) [The bad news there is that those parts of the forms were basically unavailable as long as javascript was enabled. Ouch!]

I will try to be as un-tek as I can get here. All these "input" elements share inline things like: type, id, value, name, and my favorite - maxlength="" - which most out of the box extensions are NOT utilizing - allowing the input field pretty much unlimited input. This unlimited length is not necessary. Passwords are only so long, so are names, and limiting what folks can enter into a search field might just be smart. The same goes for dollar amount fields. If you care about such things, simply add maxlength="some numeric value between 1 and 30" to your text input's properties.

It's a good idea to test things as you go, and the easiest way to do this is to toggle on/off the javascript enabled feature inside your main template's properties. It's probably also a good idea to have a full site backup before doing anything. Also, working with an application that allows immediate ftp upon save is going to make life much simpler as well, barring a local development environment of course.

In order for the javascript and CSS to take command of an input type, it is required that it has a few elements, MUST HAVE: Label, type, id, and value. The majority of common components usually don't give you label tags along side your input tags, you'll find spans or divs instead. Simply leave the JText, if available, intact and replace the opening and closing tags with label.

Each CSS element has 2 parts, if you will. One part makes the custom form inputbox, radio, checkbox background images appear, the other part makes the standard html form frame or shape "disappear". For me, if you take this website as an example, I'm taking all the css classes out of the component's and dropping them into the main template.css, and then the sub-CSS's for my theme style, in this case "beige".

Another tweak you'll have to look at is to verify the id="" inside multi-part form fields like Yes/No, or an array of check boxes, EACH input type line item MUST have a unique id="". For example Yes/No, it's not enough to have id="field" for both yes and no. You need to distinguish them from each other.

Here's a full row from a form table, for example. It creates 3 radio fields, allowing only ONE to be selected at a time:

                            get('privacyProfileView') == 0) echo '0' ? ' checked="checked"' : ''; ?> name="privacyProfileView" />  get('privacyProfileView') == 20) echo '20' ? ' checked="checked"' : ''; ?> name="privacyProfileView" />  get('privacyProfileView') == 30) echo '30' ? ' checked="checked"' : ''; ?> name="privacyProfileView" />  

Notice the way I decided to handle the checked state. Somewhat different from the original code from TPLancers around line 22 of profile.privacy.php if you have it to inspect. Not saying it's better, just more compact and works for me!

If you'd like to see a full page tutorial with all the code working together, please comment.