Any interest in a eFiction-> vBulletin bridge?
 

Hello,

I hope this is not the wrong section..feel free to throw soft objects at me if it is :)

I am in the process of moving my site from SMF to vBulletin. Part of this process is that I have to rewrite my eFiction bridge to work with vB. It is a simple bridge to link the accounts together based on user name. What it does is read the user info from global.php and auto-login to eFiction, or make a new account if there is none. The version I am working on for vB also had the ability to pull from the vB template file, making eFiction look like part of the forum.

I was curious if anybody would be interested in such a bridge.

I am curious to learn more...

Like I said, it is nothing fancy, just a port of my SMF bridge but with a few modifications. The way vB handles templates makes it easy to get the parts into eFictions template system, so I can make it look like it is part of the forum.

The bridge is currently 1 way, eliminating the eFiction registration and login systems in favor of the forums, in this case vB. 2 way could be possible but it was not needed for my site setup.

Calash,

I'm not familiar with eFiction. Can we see a link to your site with it in action?

http://www.necrotania.com/eFiction/

It is still linked to SMF at the moment, but you can browse around and see the basics of how it works. It is a fan fiction archive system. I use it for letting visitors post stories, poems, and such.

the support site is http://www.efiction.org


Need to clean up the skin a bit...planning on doing that with the transition to vB.

i would be interested in this...it would be a nice addition to one of my sites

I'd be interested in this. I'm considering installing efiction once I've finished something else on my site and a bridge like this would be very useful. Thanks :)

eFiction just released there 3.0beta. I have the basics for the bridge working with the new system, however it has so much more in the way of hooks and such to use. They really did a great job with making it easier to write up bridges.

Depending on how fast it moves through beta I may hold off and not release anything until 3.0 goes gold, then release the bridge files for that.

I have gotten the template sharing working very well though, with some help from several posts here :). It requires a bit of modification to the forum templates so that it knows where to look for the images, but it is not that bad.

I look foward to this release!

<a href="http://www.necrotania.com/eFiction/index.php?skin=vB" target="_blank">http://www.necrotania.com/eFiction/index.php?skin=vB</a>

This is my skin integration. Currently only the front page is working, but I am getting others setup. My thought was to make eFiction look like it was part of the forum. The header, navbar, and footer are pulled from vB.

The user info is still tied to SMF on my main site as I have not gotten everything ready to move over.

how is this project going?

Good so far. Since eFiction 3.0 is being released shortly I am working on that aspect of it. They are adding some very nice features to make bridge construction much easier.

The VB skin pulls templates from the forum to give eFiction the same look.

Once 3.0 is released I will be upgrading my site, working out the bugs, and posting the bridge over at the eFiction site. I can post it here too, but it really does not involve any changes to vB, so I do not know if it would belong here.

a simple link to the efiction post would be fine for me :)

really looking foward to this...this is a must have for any RP site :D

The skin sharing is proving to be a slightly more complicated project. I got the front page done fine, but some of the style variables are hard coded into the files....so I will have to include them in the VB style to get the looks right.

Still working on this, but it is a minor issue.

Honestly the credit really belongs with the developers at eFiction. They have set it up in such a way that bridging to an external database is very easy. I can pull VB custom profile fields and use them on the eFic profile...or just replace the entire eFic profile if I wanted to. For this mod I am just adding fields to the current profile...easier that way :)

sounds good...i really can't wait :)

any update yet on this?

I just upgraded my live site to vB and I have the bridge running to connect it to eFiction 3.0. So far I have not had any issues with it.

eFiction 3.0 is still in beta though, and I am a bit hesitant to release the bridge until it goes gold.

I have a few parts to the bridge now. The first is the user info sharing to give you a single login for the entire site. This is now based off of user ID, making things much easier.

I also have a skin sharing module that exports the skin from vB to eFiction. This is still in development as it is quite buggy...vB skins do not like being outside of there home directory :).

I am also working on some Zoints Local blocks to pull data from eFiction over to the profile page. This is still early development though.

sounds good...you could always just release it and make sure to label it beta. I'd love to get it onto my test board at least :D

eFiction 3.0 has been released, however RL has gotten quite hectic lately.

I will try to get everything together this weekend. I need to write up basic instructions and get the code commented better. The mod will be entirely on the eFiction side...no vB edits required for the login function.

did you ever get this done?

http://efiction.org/forums/index.php?topic=4702.0

I am sorry about the delay....things got busy for a while....and I got lazy ;)


It is still beta software with some bugs, but as people test it I hope to be able to get them worked out.

Beautiful! I've been looking for something like this! :)