[Michael Morris]

Hello again all. My day job has been interfering with this project with 12 hour days, so the release time is being pushed back farther than I'd like. I have somethings done, though not in a releaseable package, and this is what I'm working on at present.

1. I'm currently studying how joomla calls edit bots for a feasability study of replacing Joomla's inbuilt tinyMCE editor with the vbulletin editor. I'm not holding out too much hope for this as the vb editor seems to want to run as one instance of the editor per page - whereas joomla uses multiple instances.
2. I have written a vbcode mambot that calls up the vbulletin parser library and parses bbcode on joomla posts.
3. I have also written a mapping routine that runs at install time to map the vbulletin forums to a joomla menu. I'm working on the support libraries for this in vbulletin to keep that menu current, then I need to hack the joomla admin code to prevent that particular menu from being edited in Joomla aside from publishing and unpublishing the entries. This menu exists to allow joomla modules to be assigned on a per forum basis in vbulletin, so you can display one set modules in forum Y and another set in forum B
4. I'm thinking on a way in joomla to assign vbulletin templates to specific pages. Database side I can just place a styleid code on the jos_menu table then have a vbulletin plugin load that styleid based on the current itemid on joomla pages. The trick is how to get that id there in a user friendly manner - a dropdown with a list of current vbulletin styles would be idea and there is code to build it in the vbadmincp somewhere since it exists in the forum editor, placement is what I'm pondering.
5. General planned schema of the installer is as follows. I will hack the joomla installer and at the step where it requests db information I will replace that code with an attempt to find the forum in it's three most likely locations (one level lower in /forum, one level higher or same level). If it fails to find the forum then it will ask the user to locate the forum. It will at no point re-request the db info - instead this is pulled from the vbulletin config.php file.
   
   After it finds the forum db it should auto install it's product xml package into the vb plugin system, run the installer code, then ask how the user wants to map the usergroups in vbulletin to the joomla groups (this can be later changed). The system will also ask which user groups it should go ahead and map into joomla's user table (by default the admin and super admins are the only ones mapped over). Note that vJoomla only normally syncs up the user which have actually visited a joomla page while logged into vbulletin and it works just fine - it doesn't need to keep a perfect copy of the vbulletin user table and doing so (as well as maintaining it) would be a major hassle anyway.
   
   Once the user map is set vJoomla will conclude as normal Joomla does asking you to delete the install directory.
6. With the above in place the only other part remaining are components, modules and mambots for joomla that will tighten it's integration with vbulletin. I have these planned:
   • Commenting mambot: This will allow you to map a joomla section, category or content item to a specific thread or a forum. If a forum then a new thread will be created when the first comment is made. On the vbulletin side the "comments" forum can be left visible or hidden.
   • recent threads module - to display recent threads. This will be similar to the ones most portal packages out there use. I will be adding the wrinkle of caching the results to a file on set intervals for big boards
   • hot threads module - as above
   • Who's online - module to show who's online overall, not just who's online in joomla. When I have the time I'll write a companion plugin for vbulletin to trace where the user is online in joomla instead of returning 'unknown location'
   • Search - Joomla has search, as does vbulletin, but long term a search module capacle of searching both simualtaneously is desireable.

Long list - very long. Still working on it. Hope to have an update soon.