On 12/25/2010 11:44 AM, Gary Mort wrote:
On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Phil M Perry <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I realize that I can't (without a lot of pain and work) get SMF
and osC to use the same member ID system and session control, so
that signing on to one will let a user jump back and forth among
SMF, osC, and my custom pages without losing session (sign-on,
cart contents).
Yes and no.....you can't have them use the same session generally
without a lot of work.
Well, that would be the chief attraction of a CMS such as Drupal, to not
have to fool with coordinating all the bits and pieces to use one common
session. It's just too bad that applications like SMF and osC are
written to assume that they own the whole show and don't have to play
nicely with others. If they all were written with plug-in modules to
permit easy swapping out of session (and user sign-on) in favor of
common systems, or just use something common in the first place, it
would be so much easier.
As for a shared user database, there is an easy way to do this
assuming your on a fairly recent level of MySQL[somewhere in the 5.x
series, I forget which].
MySql introduced the concept of "views" in version 5. This means you
can delete the user tables for osCommerce and your own code, and then
recreate them as views combined the SMF tables with a small table for
any missing columns. This way if osCommerce updates it's user table,
it will automatically is reflected in the other views.
An interesting approach. If I understand you correctly, you make one
shared table look like it's the dedicated user information table for
SMF, for osC, for application X, etc.? That might be workable. The
alternative would be to keep all the applications entirely separate, but
when updating one's user table, pass that information on to the other
applications and update their tables. Again, a single CMS eliminates the
need for all these efforts.
I want ...
I have never been happy with the integrated forums of any CMS....
Since SMF has a rich hook language, I'd say use it[I myself prefer
FUDforum]
For ecommerce, use Ubercart.
For everything else, I find Drupal to be an 80% solution, so long as
you don't fear coding your own final 20% it will work well.
I see that the tag line for the January meeting is "community site",
which upon reflection, probably covers more of the forum side than
ecommerce side. However, that would still be a good opportunity to
discuss forum capabilities and limitations, even if the Ubercart side
gets short shrift.
I will probably have to do a fair amount of custom coding in any case.
I'm just concerned that there are more opportunities to screw up a CMS
than a glued-on application that was originally standalone. If I can
modify the standalone applications to share a common session structure
and some sort of common user information (account ID, password, etc.),
that would hopefully be much of what's needed. However, I'd like to
avoid that work (and later updates breaking something) by going with a
CMS. My concern then becomes that the CMS "applications" (subsystems)
are either the wrong architecture to operate like SMF and osC, or are
too difficult to bend to what I want. Perhaps the talk and discussion
(at the meeting and here) could address the pros and cons of the two
approaches I've been considering. I hope that all interesting discussion
can be saved on the site in some manner, as it looks like there's no
chance of my getting to the meeting.
Thanks much for discussion on this matter, and I look forward to hearing
what others have done to successfully integrate multiple "applications"
into a single site.
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