PhpBB/Mambo Comments

On our main page the 'Read More and View Comments' takes you to the wrong story in our forums. Here's a link to our site http://www.houstonvehicles.com so you can see what's going on. If you click on a front page story it takes to you the wrong story in the phpbb. It seems after a few days the front page articles start taking you to the wrong stories in the forums but our reviews take you to the right articles.

terracon
http://www.houstonvehicles.com

My best guess is that your database table is messed up for for some reason. The table that we create at the beginning of the installation process is the link between the forum thread # and the id# of the content.

I noticed that the id #s of your frontpage content are really low for the amount of articles on your site. Did you reset something?

When you go to the forum, and click the link back to the article, the story ids are much higher in old stories than the new ones. My guess is that what caused the problem. It can be fixed by manually realigning the table information, if the script is just temporarily off.

I have to go to work, but Ill look more into it tonight. Please reply with any additional info you think might help. Did you install or change anything around the time it stopped working?

I think it get's thrown off by our News items. Is it possible to exclude comments from that one. I looked through the comments earlier and I didn't really see a specific way on how to do it. Any ideas?

So you're having a problem with a certain category or section? Are you sure it's not just the way it's displayed? Because there is nothing really different about stories grouped in different categories or sections, only the Itemid. But all the Itemid really does is create the proper pathway on the page and make the proper menu item active.

If you look closer, it will probably be a task or option in the URL that's messing things up, not a section or category.

If you find something else, come on back. Or if you still think I'm wrong, some back too.

I'm not the one that updates our front page but the way I understand it is that for the news section. What he does is just edit the same news item rather than making a new one. I think this is what throws the numbers out of sync. The news id doesn't change. That's my theory.

terracon
http://www.houstonvehicles.com

That is definitely the answer. Because when the story is loaded, it checks the database to see if there is a thread id # associated with the story id #. If there is, it just links the two. If not, it inserts the post and then creates the link.

The script has no way of telling if the story has changed to create a new thread. That's why I have a disclaimer at the top of the inserted post :

(Note: This is original version of article. It may have been edited. Click on link above for most recent version.)

So, just have him write new stories instead of copying over the old ones. It would seem to be such an incrementally small amount of extra work to create a new story than just editing it. Doesn't that method mess up your archives too?

The reason he does it this way is because he doesn't want the news archived.

terracon
http://www.houstonvehicles.com

I was delighted to see a solution to being able to add comments into a phpBB forum from Mambo.

I hope you don't mind me asking how would you do it with a standalone phpBB, rather than the component version.
I hope that you could help. I presume that the code below from your hack/mod would need to be modified?

Code: Select all

//$query = "SELECT id FROM " . $mosConfig_dbprefix . "menu WHERE link = 'index.php?option=com_forum'";
//$db->sql_query($query);
//$Itemid = $db->sql_fetchfield('id');

Thanks Steve

I guess my first question is are they on the same database? Are they two unrelated scripts on the same server or do they share user tables? Because I had to modify the phpbbfetchall script and the insert post script quite a bit so that they would use the right users table.

As for the commented out code that you mention, that (I believe) brings back the variables to Joomla after the unset command clears them earlier. I have it commented out, because since we keep the variables alive, we do not need then to be re-established. In fact, it messes things up.

So, if no phpbb page appears inside a Joomla page, this should be much easier and almost exatcly like Fluffy's hack described on page 1 of the article.

So, does the phpbb and Joomla share and DB info, like users?

The databases are separate, although they don't have to be!

Users are separate as no one logs onto the Mambo site, only admin does, just the phpBB.

I use the phpBB sessions on the mambo pages, so users are logged on even when on a Mambo page.

Steve

First -- Terracon:

If he doesn't want them archived, he shouldn't put comments on them, because that creates a permanent archive in the forum of the article.

If he just doesn't want archives on the Mambo/Joomla section, then just have the stories become unpublished after 7 days or something.

If you want to use your current system, unfortunately this hack cannot work. It is dependent on the id # being unique for each article.

Second -- Steve:

If you just change the links on page 3 to your php root path and the $viewcomment and $postcomment variables to reflect links to pages in your forum and not in your forum within joomla, you should be okay.

Also, you should use the original insert_post and phpbbfetchall . They refer to the id. id is user_id in phpbb, so change any reference of id to user_id. Also do the smae for integrate.inc.

That should cover it, but let me know.

Thanks Chris, I will get back to you when I have tried it out.

I am waiting for the phpBB userbot to be completed and Joomla 1.1 to be stable first though. I can't wait to try it in anger.

Another thing, will this addon work if you only want registered (phpBB) users to be able add commments - so that they can get back to their posts if they need to re edit them.

There is a bot that enables content (mosifbot?) to be shown to registered members, so I was going to place your code within this together with a hack that alllows php code within Mambo.

Would you mind if I placed a reference to your mod on other forums relating to Joomla and phpBB.


Steve

Steve --

Sorry for the long wait to reply. I've been pretty busy trying to keep my full-time radio job while starting a labor union and simultaneously nursing a piece of software (unrelated to this) to release. That more than anything else takes up my time in front of the computer.

Yes, in this hack, the reply link is the same as clicking the reply button at the bottom of a thread. So, it follows all of the rules that you have set in PhpBB.

Feel free to do anything you want in terms of spreading the news of this half-ass project and also any improvements you suggest would be greatly appreciated. The hack is open-source, so do what you will with it. When you open the intergate.inc file, the intro is the license for this stuff.

I really want to get it outside the realm of core-file hacks, but I've just not spent the time to investigate how to write it properly. That's why I've gotten the how many new posts since your last vist module working on my site, but haven't released it as a documented thing. Log in to see how it works. It's totaly stolen from the portal page of phpbbfetchall.

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