Major Additions - Joomla for vBulletin (IMPORTANT UPDATE) - Bridge to the World's Most Popular CMS

Warning!!! An potential exploit has been found in this modification. The server that hosts vjoomla.com has been attacked several times. It is known to already be severely comprimised so at this time it is unclear whether the vulnerability lies in vJoomla, Joomla itself or the server. Until this is resolved to my satisfaction I am removing this modification. My apologies.


The modification WILL be re-released once this issue is resolved!

vJoomla is an offshoot of Joomla 1.0 that is designed to run in tandem with vbulletin. Unlike the main release it will not run without vbulletin - if you desire a CMS without a forum then use Joomla! instead. vJoomla is identical in most all regards to Joomla!

What vJoomla Does

• Provide a single session, single login interface to Joomla and vbulletin.
• Allows Joomla pages to be skinned by vbulletin's template engine.
• Maps Joomla usergroups to vbulletin usergroups.

What vJoomla Does Not Do

• It does not rewrite your templates for you - so you will need to go in currently and change relative links to images and pages to absolute links. This is most important in the style sheets and in the navbar template. This is something you need to do yourself rather than programmatically since no two sites are likely to be using the same style sheet and the same setup for these links.

Install Instructions

1. Log into your admincp
2. Close your forum
3. If your forums are at the root of your site move them elsewhere - the best location is probably /forum
4. Upload the files from the zip packages to their respective locations. There should be no overwrites.
5. Navigate to the root of your site and run the Joomla installer.
6. Go back to the admincp and install the Joomla product file
7. Now either copy the ./cpstyles, ./clientscript and ./images directory of the forum into the Joomla directory OR create symbolic links to those directories. The contents of the ./images directory of Joomla and vbulletin will need to be merged.

This is release candidate 2.

[TheMusicMan]

Sure thing pxd, I respect your requirements absolutely. If that's what you are interested in using vJoomla for, then thats brilliant and I wish you the very best of luck so doing and I would be interested in seeing what you come up with.

As with all applications and software development, it is about what works best for you after all.

On a personal level this is in fact exactly what I have done (mainly because there was no CMS module/app available that I could use effectively for my site). On a business level though, for my clients... it is a different matter alltogether. They'd would be looking to use a CMS based application on/for their site first, and then if required, add forum functionality to it - not the other way around.

[Michael Morris]

Originally Posted by TheMusicMan

Hi Michael: Database Layer, Functional Layer, Presentation Layer i.e. templates, themes, styles etc.

I see you have coded vJoomla to utilise the vB template system - not the way around I would have wanted as I believe there are many more effectove CSM type styles out there for Joomla/Mambo than vB (vB is not a CMS, Jomla and Mambo are more close to it) - so for me I guess that's a shame. I would say people who would want this bridge would want it to add CMS functionality to their forum and NOT forum functionality to their CMS.

Super work though... as Mr Bob said above... kudos.

Until a stable release of Joomla 1.5 what you desire isn't possible. We won't have a stable release of that platform for at least another year and I need to revise vbulletin site still stuck on 3.0 NOW. I use Joomla at work and I really don't want to work any longer with the portal systems available for vbulletin. While I appreciate the hard work that has gone into them, they are ultimately insufficient for my needs.

Your defense of Joomla's "template" engine doesn't impress me. Joomla! templates SUCK. They aren't proper CSS, yet they require CSS to attempt to style them (good luck considering most Joomla components as written are table cities). They suck so bad that I use a modified version of Joomla commericially that rewrites key files to use the patTemplate engine to draw the html, instead of the asinine default Joomla! approach of putting html output into class files that are nigh unreadable (Could be worse though - could be OS Commerce). Considering they will be DEAD ANYWAY once Joomla 1.5 is released I'm not going to cry for them.

So yes, vJoomla grafts Joomla! onto vbulletin - it doesn't allow the reverse at present. I can't conceive of a reverse either - I'm never seen a pure CMS system with more than a handful of users (though I'm sure they are out there) though any vbulletin board worth it's salt has at least a couple hundred (or in my case a couple hundred thousand) user accounts to worry about if you were ever to merge them.

You also completely missed one final point. When it comes down to it - bbpixel is illegal. vJoomla is not. I put all the hacks in the Joomla code because, in the end, I will be re-releasing it under the GPL as a seperate package. The beautiful part of Open Source and the GPL license is you can do this under it. If I where to modify and distribute any part of the vbulletin code (as bbpixel does) this would be a violation of Jelsoft's commerical license.

I plan for vJoomla to be around for the next couple years as a branch off the Joomla 1.0 trunk, development of which has ceased in favor of 1.5. (So there should be a minimum of problems with 1.0 compliant components and modules). When 1.5 is released I will then develop a version for 1.5 which - if all the hype around 1.5 is true - should be possible without executing any code hacks in 1.5.

[adhari_com]

Fully loaded, up and running on test server.
Beleieve me this is a dream come true, imagine the possibilities!

[TheMusicMan]

Woah there.... I am not criticising you, and I haven't missed any point at all. My compliments to you for taking this project on and sticking to it, but don't come all angry at me - I have done nothing. I have never looked at bbpixel let alone used it.

I appreciate you are defending your work, which is admirable... but I am not attacking it so really there's no need.

What defense of Joomla's template engine!!?? All I said was that people want sites first, forums after that's all. Unless you are wanting to run thegreenperilfromhellclan dot com!!

Take a look at large business' www sites... CMS and quality content all over the place... forums, well... these are nowhere to be seen really are they - hence the CMS first then forums if required.

[Michael Morris]

I'm sorry - pre morning coffee post, or something like that. Anyway, I prepare large business CMS sites for a living. One of the reasons I want to move to Joomla as a CMS for my vbulletin boards is to unify my component work load and get more reuse out of me code. Every CMS I've built for a company though has always been with a custom style designed for them by a design firm. At the end of the day I found it was easier to replace Joomla's "template" engine with patTemplate (a move Joomla itself is doing in version 1.5). Translating templates from patTemplate to vbulletin is about 2 minutes work or less / template -- in other words it's a piece of cake.

Grafting vbulletin to an existing Joomla site would be a pain since there is no user import feature at present. Most companies though don't need a forum package as full featured as vbulletin so Simpleboard or Fireboard for Joomla will probably serve them well enough.

Again, this is primarily meant as "joomla as an addon for vbulletin" rather than the other way around. I could write it the other way, but I believe that waiting for 1.5 for such a product release is probably more realistic.

[Cheertobi]

Will it, later on, be possible to have joomla into i a subdirectory instead of vb?

[Michael Morris]

The installer program will make an attempt to find the forum path. It will look in same root, then ./forum, then ./forums. If it cannot find it then it will ask you to provide the absolute path to the forum library. It will then test to make sure it can parse vbulletin. If it succeeds then it will install joomla and add the forum path to the joomla configuration vars as well as copying the appropriate elements from the vb config to it's own.

So the answer is that in the final version you will be able to put the forum on any path you wish so long as PHP's open_base_dir directive doesn't block joomla from executing forum scripts.

[Cheertobi]

Wow, that really sounds great!

Just another question, my users use a lot of special characteres in their usernames. All other bridges, that "just" sync usertables got problems with charecters like '#*~, because joomla does not support them! Will this also be a problem with vJoomla?

Regards,

Tobi

[Michael Morris]

Originally Posted by Cheertobi

Wow, that really sounds great!

Just another question, my users use a lot of special characteres in their usernames. All other bridges, that "just" sync usertables got problems with charecters like '#*~, because joomla does not support them! Will this also be a problem with vJoomla?

Regards,

Tobi

vJoomla allows vbulletin to handle all aspects of user management - it doesn't manage users itself so this shouldn't be a problem.

[TheMusicMan]

Originally Posted by Michael Morris

I'm sorry - pre morning coffee post, or something like that. Anyway, I prepare large business CMS sites for a living. One of the reasons I want to move to Joomla as a CMS for my vbulletin boards is to unify my component work load and get more reuse out of me code. Every CMS I've built for a company though has always been with a custom style designed for them by a design firm. At the end of the day I found it was easier to replace Joomla's "template" engine with patTemplate (a move Joomla itself is doing in version 1.5). Translating templates from patTemplate to vbulletin is about 2 minutes work or less / template -- in other words it's a piece of cake.

Grafting vbulletin to an existing Joomla site would be a pain since there is no user import feature at present. Most companies though don't need a forum package as full featured as vbulletin so Simpleboard or Fireboard for Joomla will probably serve them well enough.

Again, this is primarily meant as "joomla as an addon for vbulletin" rather than the other way around. I could write it the other way, but I believe that waiting for 1.5 for such a product release is probably more realistic.

No probs Michael... none at all mate.

I admire what you are doing here, and I may very well use it at some point. Appreciate the response.

This is sure going to be of significant benefit to the vB community. Keep up the great work.