MediaWiki vBulletin Integration

[ElfMage]

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/

[Paul M]

That page is horribly corrupt in IE.

[ElfMage]

Originally Posted by Paul M

That page is horribly corrupt in IE.

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

[Paul M]

Indeed it is.

[phlogiston]

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!

[Zachery]

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

[ElfMage]

Originally Posted by Zachery

How are user profiles handled?

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.

Originally Posted by Zachery

Is the site basicly wraped in a vBulletin template?

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.

[0ptima]

This looks cool!

[Smitty]

I'm very interested.

[ElfMage]

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