MediaWiki vBulletin Integration
 

I have been looking for a way to integrate MediaWiki with vBulletin.

I decided to write my own, since the existing solutions I found did not meet my requirements.

If you are looking for a similar solution, feel free to give it a try: http://www.arcanetek.com/

That page is horribly corrupt in IE.

:-) Thanks Paul. It is now 'better'.

Indeed it is. :)

This looks very shiny, so good in fact that I have forgotten the questions I was going to ask about a couple of concerns I had!

How are user profiles handled? Is the site basicly wraped in a vBulletin template?

vBulletin's user/login is the primary/master system.

Registrations are handled by vBulletin. (User can login in either system, login is checked/validated against vBulletin.

Currently, the user will have vBulletin preferences (User CP), and MediaWiki's User Preferences.

In the future I may merge both into vBulletin's.

When Common fields like e-mail address, name, etc, are changed in vBulletin, they are copied over to MediaWiki (so wiki's e-mail system is not affected).

I also created some internal redirects (transparent to the user of the extension), so that if a user logs in through MediaWiki's regular form, the user gets logged in into vBulletin also.

User registration is also redirected to vBulletin's.

At the same time, if a visitor goes to the wiki pages, his session is communicated to vBulletin, so he/she appears as 'guests' on vBulletin's portal.

Teh above functionality is accomplished by simply using this extension.

Not quite. Here is brief explanation as to the structure and design of my site.

I customized vBulletin by adding the top bar with the search box, and the main links (which still need some work). I did this by creating a new header template, and including it into vBulletin's default header.

Then on the wiki site, I took the default skin, and modified it extensively (almost wrote my own from scratch). Initially it was relatively advanced, implemented solely using CSS, worked beautifully on Firefox/NS/etc, but as Paul mentioned Internet Explorer was less than polite in presenting what I originally intended, so I changed the skin back to regular old tables until I have time to revisit it.

I added a menu bar similar to that found in vBulletin (I wrote my own menu system in javascript).

And finally, I added the same login form found on vBulletin's menubar, with the corresponding redirect into vBulletin's login process, visible when there is no user logged in.

In the same place, when there is a user logged in, I implemented some mediawiki tags (explained on the extension's documentation page) that get me the PM information, last visit, etc.

This looks cool!

I'm very interested.

Feel free to download the test build and give it a try. Thanks.

Hmm.. interesting. I integrated MediaWiki 1.5 with vBulletin a long time ago: http://wiki.unrealadmin.org

But I needed to hack quite some things in the MediaWiki code to remove the User: and UserTalk: namespaces and a couple of other things because our forum wasn't restricted much in the usernames.
Is MediaWiki 1.7 more flexible? Or did you still have to hack some of the core files?

very interesting :) keep up the good work

Interesting, before I started writing this extension I searched the web for integrations, but the ones I found had some limitations (e.g. the user had to login twice, once in vB, and once in Wiki)


MediaWiki 1.7 is more flexible in that it has more hooks. Unfortunately the limitation user names has not gone away.

So far I have had no need to modify MediaWiki's code.

In my extension I solved this limitation by implementing a transparent user name 'translation' system where if there is a vB user named [Clan]Mist, in mediaWiki he/she is authenticated as ClanMist-5 (assuming that 5 is this user's userid).

This, however, is transparent to the user, as whenever the user's name is displayed by MediaWiki, it is shown as [Clan]Mist. In fact the user can either log in through vBulletin, or login through MediaWiki's login page, and in both cases the user would enter his/her vB login [Clan]Mist.

The name ClanMist-5 is only used in URLs and in internal mediawiki processing.

At least this is the theory.. <g>

This is a bit off topic, but... I go in via telnet to upgrade the wiki I have istalled - version 1.5.5 - to version 1.7.1 - When I try to upgrade I get:

server# php /<path>/wiki/maintenance/update.php
php: Command not found.
server#

Any ideas why it can't find the php command?

Sent you a PM. Not sure if it will help.. <g>

This is very interesting. I have been looking for a wiki that could integrate with my VBulletin memberbase so they don't have to log in twice.

I would be very interested in this mod when complete. Do you have an ETA perchance?

The only thing that I would like to have is a restricted pages feature, where I can make certain pages viewable only by certain groups. That and the login feature, this thing would be perfect for me :)

The completion of this extension will be determined by how many bugs or issues are found during testing (it is being tested right now).
At this point no new features are being added.

Regarding the restricted page feature. This extensions now implements user group synchronization, whereby you control the groups a user belongs to from within vB's AdminCP, and then when the user logs into the wiki side, the groups are carried over.

I haven't researched fully MediaWiki's security/restrictions capabilities.

Nice :) I was just looking for a MediaWiki/vB bridge :)

Hows the BETA going?

So far so good. :)

The core functionality seems to be stable. The latest issues that's being worked on are related to multi-language support (non-english boards), and other misc.

Thats all you can see now for 2 Days :

I have the site down for some major restructuring. I posted a 'maintenance' message on the home page, forum, etc, but I didn't catch that entry point you mention.

Basically, I am moving all plugin/developer/design content to a new site that will be a better home for it. I think both sites should open again later on tonight or tomorrow morning.

That is the entry Point you posted here in the first Posting. ;)

Anyway - thx for Information. ;)

:) Thanks.

The site is back online. In addition, all development content has been moved to www.arcanetek.com.

Both sites still require some work (skinning, navigation, content, etc). But the are functional.

ElfMage has done a really great job with this Mediawiki bridge.

The more testers we have, the better. It's no big deal to set up a development wiki because the bridge does not touch your vB files or require the installation of any vB plugins.

Painless to demo.

Same here! That would be great.

Can we have an update on how things are going?

Things are progressing. The project was moved to www.arcanetek.com (the site is also under construction, but it has all the information / downloads there).

In the next build the following changes will be found:

• The extension will be renamed to vbWiki (its original name was luxury_vBulletin, because it was initially coded for www.luxurywiki.com, since then it has been released to the public, and the previous name is not as applicable :).
• Added new settings to control whether to allow MW to create forums automatically.
• Rather than redirecting the talk pages from MW to a new forum per page, it will use one forum for all talk pages, and one thread per page.
• A brand new MW skin, named vbMonoBook is now being shipped with vbWiki. This is a MW skin that makes MW assume the look from vBulletin (including navbar, login form/welcome+stats, footer links, and color theme).

In addition, in the past couple of builds several compatibility issues with php4 and MW 1.6.8 have been addressed.

The pace is a bit slower than ideal since this is not a full time project. But, we are getting there... ;)

this is the part that I was waiting on :D
if the bridge can take as much of it's style from vBulletin templates (header-navbar-footer) then with the other integration being so seemlessly good I may just propose to the hack straight out and ask it to marry me.


much kudos to ElfMage (Y)

The site is down now ... hope it will be back very soon :up:

:) Thanks. ArcaneTek.com is up now. LuxuryWiki.com is currently being updated to the latest version....

Can't wait to see it!

Are you sticking with Mediawiki 1.6.8? I hope so because I don't have the guts to upgrade to php5 yet.

My sites are running 1.7.1, but per the request of several users the extension was made 1.6.8 compatible...

Hi,
sorry if this isn't very clear. I've only recently started looking at MediaWiki, so I might mess up the terminology.

I tried luxury_vBulletin today, and haven't been able to get it to work consistently, though it seemed good to start with. I think it's down to usergroup mapping.
If I try to login as my main admin user, it needs to verify in the forum database of course. So I created a user of the same name in my forum, and a wikiadmin group and made it a member. I then mapped the groupnumber to "Bureaucrat". When I login it says I successfully logged in, but doesn't actually go to the main page.
When I disabled it and went in as my main user again I found it could see fewer special: pages. I assume it normally has both bureaucrat and sysop rights, but the mapping had removed the sysop group. How can I make a usergroup map to multiple MW groups? I've tried using "sysop,Bureaucrat" as the mapping, and I've tried using multiple lines for the same group, but got nowhere.

I could be going down a blind alley here, but hope you can help.

Jim Deakin

Hello Jim,

The current version of the luxury_vBulletin extension has a known bug when logging in and MW's page caching that makes it behave inconsistently. This among other similar bugs have been addressed and will be fixed in the next build.

Now, what you describe regarding mapping a VB's usergroup to multiple MW user roles makes a lot of sense. It will be included in the next release.

The syntax will be what you tried: "sysop,Bureaucrat".

Thanks for pointing this out.

Thanks for the quick reply, and thanks for your work on this too. I'll look forward to your next release. Any idea when it'll be ready to try?

Jim

Elfmage

how are things going, are we any closer to getting our mitts on the next update yet, please?

and ditto .. thanks for allt he hard work

Thanks Clayton. We have most of the features working, doing some testing and packaging. Should have a build in a week or so.

Good news

do you reckon it would be OK to attempt the integration now

this will be for 1.6.8 and I am pretty keen to let this one rip

Cheers

Just curious. If the forum and wiki are on different sub-domains, will there be any problems?