AlterBrains

Note sure if this is possible reading the case studies. I am thinking about one domain and five subdomains. Already figured out how to handle the SEO for the subdomains using a third-party service to generate the sitemap XML. I want to run one instance of phpBB for each subdomain. I assume Mightsites can handle the domain/subdomain architecture, but running multiple copies of phpBB is a mystery.

p8pBB is designed to handle a single phpBB installation. Any ideas on how I could make this work. phpBB is not robust enough to handle the combined number of categories and forums required for the five subdomains. I tried to do it and its performance slows to a crawl. vBulletin is the only board I know of that could handle that many categories and forums without degrading performance and no bridge exists with the capabilities of p8pBB.

The only workaround I can foresee is to make four additional copies of com_p8pBB (com_p8pBB, com_p8pBB2, ... com_p8pBB5) and hack all the references to the com_p8pBB to use the new component names, then modify the installer.xml for each component.

Maybe you have a better solution for handling this sort of thing.

The main requirement is that phpBB on each domain should display only own forums?

Can the phpBB users be shared?

I think it's possible to have single phpBB installation but display only certain forums depending on current domain name.

With phpBB, I believe there is a way of sharing the authentication, authorization and probably other common tables and having separate tables for storing forum content. With earlier versions of phpBB, the configuration file used constants like a language file (like old versions of osCommerce). I'm not sure how the configuration is handled in newer versions.

So if I can get the above to work, then is it possible to access those forums using multiple instances of p8pBB?

Site cluster is like this:
The domain has no forum but menu has links to forums in subdomains. The five subdomains need their own forums because category heirarchy is extensive. Content is shared among domain and subdomains. Domain hosts other resources such as directories, glossaries, classified ads, help system, etc.

The document below dates back to 2003 but the basic concept should still apply because the constants.php file exists in 3.2.1.

http://www.neothermic.com/kb/article55.html

So theoretically it's possible to install multiple copies of phpBB and configure the constants.php to use shared tables for authentication, authorization, sessions, etc. Since the document is dated, I need to do some research to discover if other tables need to be shared with the latest version of phpBB.

Found more recent information in this thread.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... 9#p3087439

The initial table changes mentioned in this thread should work. The core changes to the phpBB code mentioned in the thread should not be necessary. Will try the above tonight.

I would imagine that the five instances of phpBB will show up on the component's phpBB Folder dropdown. Unfortunately, the component itself handles the folder routing based on the menu link used to load phpBB. Unless MightySites has a way of using the p8pBB Bridge component five different times to access different folders, I'm probably going to have to come up with a way of installing five different bridge components using different names.

It's not a good idea to have 5 instances of phpBB and 5 clones of a component.

I guess it's better to create phpBB extension which will filter displayed forums data based on current domain.

We came up with a workaround solution of assigning different templates to K2 categories which eliminated the need for subdomains. We wanted to do this in the beginning but the customer was dead set on using subdomains.

I found two phpBB templates on Themeforest (Milk and Avalanche) that allow its categories to be displayed as a grid with each category cell having its own background image. We also talked the customer into scaling back on the category hierarchy to allow a single phpBB install.

I'm not sure if we are going to need Mightysites for this particular job but will be licensing a copy to play with. It should come in handy later on.