Pre-Sales Questions

[sarrene]

Hello, Thought I would pop in and let those that are wondering about p8pbb3 Bridge, that this is the best component I have used for a bridge. I generally do not prattle on about a component, however this is one exception. And no, I am not affiliated with developers at all other than being a customer; and a happy one at that.

I have used in the past jfusion, phpbb3bridge, rokbridge and even some smaller hacks i have done myself to bridge the two together. This is by far the best out there.


From what I have read in here and some questions I have asked myself, here are some points I think might be helpful.

Answers to some questions I have had myself:
1) VERY Small footprint on the server, (you wont see if unless you look and watch your server meter.)
2) No issues between db's or any conflicts there of.
3) So far, no issues or conflicts with any other mod, plugin or jquery (unless you are like me and create your own and mess up lol.)
4) Very easy to install.
5) Fairly easy to set up; and if you mess up, Admin here has the BEST support i have seen anywhere.
6) Did I mention the support is superb?
7) About as Secure as you can get (so long as you do not fmod your files to 777- then that is your fault)
8 ) Works flawlessly with jomsocial. (I am not sure about community builder as I have not used that in years.)
9) Can use stand alone for templates like RT phpbb3 templates, or in wrapped mode (not an unsecured iframe either, as joomlas default "wrapper") and use the current template, modules, and other aspects of joomla along with phpbb3
10) Sef works great for both joomla and phpbb3, including different settings you can choose for phpbb3 catagories and even the threads themselves.
11) Does not loose the url from old posts (t will redirect users that might have a post bookmarked using phpbb3's standard.
12) Does NOT effect seo rating: No loss or lower seo rating what so ever. If anything, I almost believe it increased ours even without a current site map.

(Note: if you used a phpbb3 sef url mod, it will cause some issues- uninstall that first. I have tested it out just for the heck of it, and it is not worth the hassle. p8pbb3 Bridge handles that better than any phpbb3 sef mod did in my opinion.)

Downside to p8pbb3 Bridge:
The only downside to this that I see is the not able to use a subdomain for the forum. If you know what you are doing, you can modify this. However, I would recommend for ease sake and no domain redirect issues, to just keep the forum inside the root directory.

Support:
Every mess up I have made, even trying to get my custom templates to work has been made painless with the support and ideas. Not to mention still answers several questions i have about phpbb3 bridge as well as other products to this day.

Security thoughts:
Smooth running, easy to manage users (from either phpbb3 or joomla) and I have not had any security issues at all.. trust me, we have tested it out.... broke the site before we were able to get into the db tables, even for a small injection.

My current testing:
I am currently testing this on a 1.6 build, and the migration has been easy and painless. So far, I am quite happy with it. No issues yet. So if you use 1.5 or 1.6, I think you will be happy with the results.

No core hacks needed:
For me, the best thing that this has over jfusion or others is no hacks applied to the core files of either joomla or phpbb3. It also does not conflict with 99.999% of plugins and components as a few other more common bridges do. No need to change/add/install files in phpbb3 either. (As i said, no hacks need to be applied in any way.)

Uninstall:
It is just as easy to uninstall. Normal joomla uninstall process, then remove the edits you made to the .htaccess. Simple as that.

Overall:
I hope that helps some, from someone that has used the bridge for several months and has been completely happy with it. Over all, if you have a joomla + phpbb3 site, I have to say it is more than worth it.

peace,
Sarrene'

[jb123]

5. This is Joomla username requirement.

I've just created 3 joomla users with space, underscore and minus in their names.

Apologies if this has already been covered elsewhere.

The Joomla recommendation that only alpha-numeric characters are used in usernames is for backward compatibility. Earlier character-sets didn't include special characters such as minus signs etc. Also earlier versions of operating systems couldn't handle spaces or specials in filenames. (Older members may remember this from DOS)

In practice it works fine with modern character-sets and operating systems if you have non alpha-numerics characters in usernames.

However the underscore can cause problems at times. In Joomla characters that are not part of the installed character-sets (for example if you had Chinese characters in a username) are replaced, during processing, with an underscore. This acts as a switch and that user is processed by usernumber not username. So for example if you have a member 'john_smith' with a usernumber of 1234 and look at his CB profile the url will be site.name/......../1234 not site.name/......../john_smith. If you try to access site.name/......../john_smith by typing in the url you get an error message that the user doesn't exist.

I have run a site for a few years using Joomla/CB/phpbb3 linked together with Jfusion. This may not therefore be applicable to using the p8pBB bridge (although I suspect it will be). If you set the forum up to direct to the CB profile rather than the phpbb3 one you need to do it by username not number as the Joomla and phpbb3 usernumers are different. This works fine until you get a username with an underscore. In the case above, going to site.name/......../john_smith will just give the user doesn't exist error. You need to manually set up redirects for each member with an underscore. e.g. site.name/......../john_smith redirects to site.name/......../1234

If you are building a new site you can set it up so it doesn't allow registration of usernames with an underscore. If you have an existing forum that you are going to bridge to Joomla, and have existing members with an underscore this can be a problem. If you set it up not to allow the underscore on registration, then existing users with an underscore can't update their profile. (When they try to submit it will generate an error that the username is illegal and won't save).

[sarrene]

I am not sure 100% what the question is, though I do know that this does work just fine. At least with underscores and tacks. For chinese or other characters, I am not 100% sure.

Our Product site uses joomla 1.7, phpbb3 3.0.9 and the p8p bridge. We have not experienced any problems yet with user names and translations. We have a few from china, middle east and Europe.

Here is a live example of a user that has underscores in his name and the url translation:
Forum post: http://darkrelic.com/forum/off-topic/co ... -words-656
Translated Profile: http://darkrelic.com/player/network/pro ... ntinemusic
Try it out for yourself. Of course we are using jomsocial, but the end result seems to be the same.

I have use jfusion in the past, and frankly though it is a good idea, it was just too bloody slow. It would really slow down a site once you started getting a lot of users and visitors on. The number of db calls it has is nuts. That is why I went looking for something else.

I am completely happy with this, more so than I ever thought. That, and as I stressed, the support is excellent. So if you have any questions or even problems and they are reasonable, the staff here are really good!

Trust me, I have messed up on a few of the products a few times hehe. They are also very patient!

I hope that the example I provided on our live site helps. TI know it is not CB, but it should give an idea none the less.

Peace,
Sarrene'

[jb123]

Hi Sarrene

Thanks for your reply.

There was no question really, I was trying to expand on why Joomla recommends alpha-numeric usernames only.

Your site looks good btw.

My site has 12,000 members, 600,000 forum posts and about 2,000 joomla articles. When I built the site 3 years ago Jfusion seemed the best solution to synchronise joomla with phpbb3. Unfortunately jfusion is only really designed to synchronises users and logins. Further integration (only using CB profiles, accessing the pm system from joomla etc) required a lot of coding changes to both joomla, CB and phpb3.

I'm now in a situation where we have outgrown the vps and are looking at migrating to a dedicated server.

Although jfusion works, it has a lot of quirks and is not 100% reliable. Because of the core modifications I made, upgrading to newer versions of the component software is difficult.

I have decided to rebuild the site using the latest versions of the software (which also include new features) on the new server and migrate the main site once the new site has been developed.

The best solutions 3 years ago are not necessarily the best ones now, so I'm looking into the possibilities. On the face of it the p8pBB bridge seems to a lot closer to what I'm looking for than jfusion.

[sarrene]

I highly recommend this bridge. I had used jfusion but as you said, so many hacks and core changes needed to be made for any custom integrations. At times that even meant to jomsocial, community builder... and I had faces issues with several templates as well. I am happy with Blogo's bridge, as it does not require ANY core hacks at all. It is.. well, beautiful!

As far as hosting goes, can I recommend the one I am using? MSE is great for a hosting company.. Great support, great company, great security and always up to date on updates..
http://myserverexpert.com/
http://myserverexpert.com/server-support

Peace,
Sarrene'

[jb123]

Thanks I'll check them out

[Creatorffm]

Hi all, I saw this question at the beginning of the thread but did not see a reply to it. I am considering buying the p8pbb bridge but would like to know if I would be able to install it on the registered domain ie: my-site.com and also on my test site which is a sub-domain of the main site, ie: test.my-site.com As the site is not yet live and I test all components in the sub-domain before adding them to the main site. The sub-domain is not publicly accessible as the Joomla site is set to offline. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Admin]

Yes, it is possible.
You can create an order for my-site.com and next ask the license code for test.my-site.com in our Support Center.

[mfallon]

Hopefully this is the right place for this question. I really want to purchase this bridge as a replacement for Jfusion but I just can't seem to get past the fact that it requires Joomla to be installed in the document root. This just seems like such a bad idea. This means anything I add to the site ends up in the Joomla installation directory. I don't understand why the Joomla and phpBB paths are treated as if they were hard coded which is never a good idea. Are there any plans on addressing this and if so is there any time table?

Thanks in advance

[Admin]

Having Joomla in document root is a requirement, otherwise the bridge may have issues.
It is impossible to change this behaviour for now.