Website Baker and Vanilla, Together!

[Steven Holder]

Long time no see WB community! Im back from the dead it seems with some scripty goodness for all of you.

I was talking to hudge yesterday and he asked me to do some WB work for him and I decided to take a crack at it. I visited the WB Forums and saw that we still hadn't fixed the lack of a message board / discussion system for WB and I set myself to fixing that problem this morning.

I was looking at Vanilla, a discussion system, and saw that they had integrated it into WordPress
quite nicely and I decided to do the same for WB.

Here are the steps to getting a vanilla discussion board to use WB's user database so that your users only have to register once.

You can download vanilla at http://www.getvanilla.com


1. Install Website Baker
For this example you will install it to /public_html/
Use the WB install script at http://www.yoursite.com to install WB

2. Install Vanilla
Install the vanilla distribution so that it its files are located in /public_html/vanilla
Run the install script at http://www.yoursite.com/vanilla to install vanilla

3. Now comes the tricky parts. Firstly, download the files needed to integrate vanilla at http://www.hackvoid.com/Vanilla2WB.rar

4. There is a vanilla folder in the zip, unzip it and place the contents into your vanilla folder, there I did all the hard parts for you Open up vanilla/conf/database.php and enter the database information that you used during your installation.

5. Now Open up phpmyadmin and run the following query on your WB Database.

Code:

ALTER TABLE users
  ADD `RoleID` int(2) NOT NULL DEFAULT '3',
  ADD `StyleID` int(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
  ADD `CustomStyle` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  ADD `FirstName` varchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  ADD `LastName` varchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  ADD `VerificationKey` varchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  ADD `EmailVerificationKey` varchar(50) DEFAULT NULL,
  ADD `UtilizeEmail` enum('1','0') NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  ADD `ShowName` enum('1','0') NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
  ADD `Icon` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  ADD `Picture` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  ADD `Attributes` text NULL,
  ADD `CountVisit` int(8) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  ADD `CountDiscussions` int(8) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  ADD `CountComments` int(8) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  ADD `DateFirstVisit` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '2006-06-06 00:00:00',
  ADD `DateLastActive` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '2006-06-06 00:00:00',
  ADD `RemoteIp` varchar(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  ADD `LastDiscussionPost` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  ADD `DiscussionSpamCheck` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  ADD `LastCommentPost` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  ADD `CommentSpamCheck` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  ADD `UserBlocksCategories` enum('1','0') NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  ADD `DefaultFormatType` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL,
  ADD `Discovery` text,
  ADD `Preferences` text,
  ADD `SendNewApplicantNotifications` enum('1','0') NOT NULL DEFAULT '0';

6. Okay, so now we need to make Vanilla aware of my our authentication class that I wrote, you uploaded it in step 4. I do this by editing the vanilla/conf/settings.php file and adding the following lines:

Code:

$Configuration['AUTHENTICATION_MODULE'] = 'People/People.Class.WBAuthenticator.php';

7. Now the last part do another query to your database and run these 2 queries, where your see <url>, write the URL to your websitebaker website.

Code:

INSERT INTO `settings` (`setting_id`,`name`,`value`) VALUES (NULL,'site_url','<url>')

Code:

INSERT INTO `settings` (`setting_id`,`name`,`value`) VALUES (NULL,'home','<url>')

8. Now, to give your default account admin permissions in Vanilla, run this query.

Code:

UPDATE `users` SET `RoleID`=4 WHERE `user_id`=1

You are done! Congratulations!

I just wrote this stuff this morning and have only tested it briefly. If you have any problems or if I left out any steps, post your error here and I will fix it.

You can see a demo @ http://www.hackvoid.com/test, sign up via wb or vanilla and you can log into either vanilla or wb.

[doc]

Hi Steven,

think lot of WB members like to see a forum which nicely integrates with WB. Will try to test it the next couple of days and provide some feedback next week.
Anyway, thanks for your contribution - highly appreciated.

Regards Christian

[Vincent]

Good to see your name again, Steven. It's been a long time!
Looks like a valuable contribution, thanks.

Vincent

[marathoner]

Thanks Steven...agreed that it's nice to see you back.

Question for you: Have you put together any snippets that extract Vanilla data to be used in WB? I guess what I'm looking for is something that would allow me to put the title of the 5 most recent Vanilla posts (with links) on my WB home page. I current do this with SMF. I'm sure that I could figure out how to do it but don't want to reinvent the wheel if you've already done this.

[Steven Holder]

I haven't made a script that pulls headlines but I am sure it wouldn't be that hard to do. Just use the LUM_Discussion table and pull fields that you need out of it.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/210/449220185_6559566740_b.jpg

That is the database scheme for vanilla so it makes it easy to manipulate their database.

[DGEC]

Looks like a pretty nice forum. A couple issues I see, for some people.

1. There's a still a bunch of functionality that isn't there yet. I think I was reading the roadmap or future plans or something when I saw that.

2. I suspect the forum or default template has a browser compatibility issue - it keeps locking up IE7. I believe I read recently something about the Yahoo toolkit having a JS issue/error that would result in repeated reloads of the page. It couldn't find some file I think. Not sure if it's the same thing or not.

3. Maybe it's #2 or maybe it's all the AJAX, but it feels a bit slow rendering the page.

[Revive]

Hello,
I have a couple questions regarding an error upon install.

1) when I placed the Vanilla files in the vanilla folder on my root install, and then went to www.website.com/vanilla, i get this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: show_menu2() in /home/passanie/public_html/revivecoffeehouse/pages/vanilla/templates/daybreak/index.php on line 36

Also, in regards to the files within the hackvoid zip.. do I place just the contents of the vanilla folder from the zip into the vanilla install folder? Or do I place the complete vanilla folder form the zip (folder and contents) into the vanilla install folder?

Thanks again, we look forward to using your script!

[Steven Holder]

When you unzip the package file, all the files in the vanilla folder are already in the right places, just drag and drop ontop of your vanilla directory.

And I haven't tested this with any other templates except the default one, so I'm not sure about the first error, I will look into it later.

[Revive]

Hi Steven,

Excellent, thank you. Yes, I installed the directory just as unzipped. As for the error,.. it is probably something to do with the Show_Menu2 module.. from what it reads.. not sure why though. Anything I can do to assist with this, please let me know.

[vinny84]

I have Many roles in my WB can have the default set to a particular group 1 o 2 o....

can some 1 send me the steps of doing this please

thanks in advance

Cheers
Vinny

[Steven Holder]

You can download WinRAR for free at http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm

[tsb]

got the rar now open,

I quoted the stuff in myphpadmin, through something like sql, im not up on database editing, yet everything seemed to be accepted.

 I had some bother getting the right address for the settings in conf, yet once that was done, everything is done without any visible glitch, it doesnt seem to know me if I login however, or try to login, it just goes back to the normal address, with sign in in the right corner, which should have my name, have I put the wrong address in anywhere? or a page to look at, as I say, Im a novice in this part,

hope my problem makes sense, cheers,

[Steven Holder]

When you executed the query

Code:

INSERT INTO `settings` (`setting_id`,`name`,`value`) VALUES (NULL,'site_url','<url>')

You changed the <url> to the url of your website, like http://example.com right?

[tsb]

I just put in www.strudal.co.uk, my address without the http:// part,  can I overwrite in the myphpadmin?

[mehdi]

it works
 great!
is there any way that users be logged in  automatically to forum if they have been logged before in WB ?

[spawnferkel]

Hey mehdi,

did you or someone else found a solution?
>>is there any way that users be logged in 
>>automatically to forum if they have been logged before in WB ?

But I am very happy with the vanilla-connection! Great! Thank you Steven!

[vinny84]

Hello I got this error.
all my web baker tables have a prefix of wb can some 1 help when do i modify this to get it working

---
A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred
Technical information (for support personel):

Error Message
    An error occurred while retrieving discussions.
Affected Elements
    DiscussionManager.GetDiscussionList();

    The error occurred on or near: Table 'WebBaker.users' doesn't exist

For additional support documentation, visit the Lussumo Documentation website at: lussumo.com/docs

----
waiting some suggestions.

cheers
Vimal

[Steven Holder]

Just a guess, but when you edit your database.conf file, you should probably have Vanilla look for wb_users and not users.

[vinny84]

Thanks

[slafochmed]

I did a fresh websitebaker 2.7 and vanilla 1.4.4 install and I am getting the following error:

Error Message
    An error occurred while retrieving cookie names.
Affected Elements
    WBAuthenticator.GetCookieName();

    The error occurred on or near: Table 'vanilla.settings' doesn't exist

For additional support documentation, visit the Lussumo Documentation website at: lussumo.com/docs