Integration with vBulletin - vbWiki Standard - vBulletin+MediaWiki integration

Update:

9/28/2007: vbWiki Std v1.3 RC5 is now available for download. This version adds compatibility with MW 1.11.0+

5/17/2007: vbWiki Std v1.3 RC4 is now available for download. This version is compatible with MW 1.10.0+ and vBulletin 3.6.6+

1/21/2007: vbWiki Std v1.0.2 RC3 is now available for download. This version fixes the 'session error' that used to happen on some installations of MediaWiki 1.9.x.

Description:

vbWiki Standard is the lite version of vbWiki Pro. vbWiki Standard allows the integration of vBulletin and MediaWiki user authentication.

(vbWiki Pro is a commercial product that, in addition to the functionality found in vbWiki Standard, provides full skin integration, enhanced user management, Admin CP, editing of wiki skin in vBulletin's Style Manager, among other features.)

Why should you add a wiki to your forums?

Forums are great for community building with their high level of interactivity. Successful forums have hundreds or thousand of concurrent users creating and replying to threads.

However due to this very reason the more your forums grow the more "collective knowledge" is scattered throughout the thousands (or hundreds or millions) of threads in your forums. Making it difficult for users to find and use.

A wiki is not that good at community building, but it is a great medium to centralize this 'collective knowledge'. Enabling you to create an 'ecosystem of information' (quoting pipin ) maintained and contributed by your users.

The idea behind vbWiki (both Standard and Pro) is to enable the seamless integration between these two packages (vBulletin and MediaWiki) side-by-side in your community. You (and your users and community) get the best of both worlds.

Or so the theory goes...

Features:

• Single sign-on for vBulletin and MediaWiki (users log in only once)
• Supports mapping of vBulletin usergroups to MediaWiki user roles
• Users viewing wiki pages are shown in vBulletin's "What's going on?" section (both guests and registered users)
• Supports auto-authentication, users who choose to be "remembered" are logged in upon visiting the site to both vBulletin and MediaWiki.

Installation:

These installation instructions do not apply to vbWiki Pro. Refer to vbWiki Pro installation instructions for more information.

MediaWiki and vBulletin must be installed and properly working before installing vbWiki. MediaWiki can be downloaded here.

• Create a new directory in your forums directory named vbWiki.
• Upload the content of the installation package to this new directory.
• Rename the file vbWiki_Init.php-dist to vbWiki_Init.php
• Open the file LocalSettings.php found in your MediaWiki directory in a text editor and at the very end find the following line and remove it if present:

PHP Code:

?> 


• Add the following code at the end of the file (entering the correct directory path):

PHP Code:

require_once "/absolute/path/to/your/forums/vbWiki/vbWiki_Init.php"; 


Troubleshooting:

• Last installation step: Click Mark as Installed..

If you run into any trouble installing vbWiki (blank page, logins not working, etc.), follow these instructions to temporarily turn on vbWiki's Diagnostic Tools.

Open vbWiki_Init.php (or vbWikiPro_Init.php) and find this line:

PHP Code:

$run_vbWikiPro_diag_tools = false; 


And change it for this:

PHP Code:

$run_vbWikiPro_diag_tools = true; 


Navigate to the wiki home page, and see the results.

Changes:

• 0 vBulletin files to Edit
• 1 MediaWiki file to Edit
• 10 vbWiki Files to Upload

Requirements:

• vBulletin v3.5.4 (version 3.6.x recommended)
• MediaWiki 1.6.8+ (recommended 1.7.x+).
• PHP4+

Uninstalling...

• To uninstall vbWiki Standard simply remove (or comment) the line added to LocalSettings.php.
• Optionally remove the directory vbWiki from your forums directory.

[Jon_Simmonds]

Has anyone else purchased vbwiki pro and not received the download information within the 20mins (as stated on their website)?

[ElfMage]

Hello Jon, I replied to your e-mail. The download information is sent by an automated process (within 5 minutes of the order being received). Once in a while we see a customer who didn't receive the e-mail because it was stopped by a spam filter or some other similar cause.

In any event, I resent the access instructions to you. Thanks.

[Jon_Simmonds]

Thanks

[mikeylikesitz]

i have an error and the wiki doesnt use the forum login

Warning: ini_set(): A session is active. You cannot change the session module's ini settings at this time. in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/wiki/includes/User.php on line 622

i ran the tools and it says it cannot find my absolute forum path. I am running php 4.4, MediaWiki 1.6.8, vbulletin 3.6.4, vbWiki standard

any ideas would be appreciated

[ElfMage]

Hi, make sure that vbWiki is installed as a subdirectory of your forums, and that in vbWiki_Init.php the forum path is using the default value of

dirname(__FILE__) . '/..'

If you'd like PM me a link to your wiki/forum, and I'll take a look.

Thanks.

[Necrosaro420]

Would I be able to like, have my forums on www.myforums.com and host the wiki on www.mywiki.com and have vb work with it that way?

[ElfMage]

The trick with different domains is the cookie tunneling to share sessions and login persistence between the two domains..

The standard version doesn't have this feature included. However, you could accomplish the same results with the standard version by using the mod created by thincom2000 found here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=139272

[Necrosaro420]

what permission do I give my usergroups to start new pages? I dont understand how all that works.

[ElfMage]

vbWiki Standard will allow you to map vBulletin's usergroups to wiki usergroups.

But then you need to control the wiki usergroups permissions manually, per MediaWiki's usergroup (roles) functionality. (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:...g_group_rights)

[newbe_haselina]

Sorry for asking kind of offtopic ... in the requirements it's said, that you can run wikimedia under PHP version 4 ... but this doesn't work for me? the wiki installation routine tells me, that PHP5 is required and it's aborting.

Can somebody please give me a hint, where I can look for a suitable mediawiki version or what else I could do instead?

Need this stuff urgently