We started jamendo with a phpBB forum that we quickly replaced with punBB. Now I think we’ve reached the limits of punBB too (utf8 support, please!) so it’s time to move on to something that’s more of a framework.

My good friend Martin suggested Vanilla, I’ve been looking through the code and it seems to fit. I’ll keep the changes I had to make here, maybe that’ll help other people integrate Vanilla too.

1. General integration ======================

I ran the Vanilla install, patched conf/settings.php fixing some paths and options. I’ll have to rewrite all the files at the root of Vanilla inside my own page system.

Vanilla uses many global variables, I hope there won’t be any variable collisions.

2. The authentification/session system ======================================

Let’s begin with auth, I have to plug our own auth system into Vanilla. For simplicity’s sake I’ve chosen to mirror my user table with Vanilla’s one. I have a simple script that fills/updates the table for the current logged user at each page. That’s a slight overhead but I think it’s workable.

All these patches are only in the People.Class.Session.php file. I remember having to change 5+ files for punBB to plug my own Session/Auth system, that’s quite a change ;-)

3. AJAX =======

The remote ajax endpoints call appg/init_ajax.php. I had to patch this file to call my CMS inside of a php chdir().

4. Extensions =============

I installed a bunch of extensions. Some of them will be incompatible for one of the following reasons :

• they don’t call init_ajax.php in their ajax calls.
• they include a file after init_ajax.php, but the include will fail because of the chdir() I made. I could undo it, though.
• they use some template features I didn’t keep in my patched theme.

5. Internationalization =======================

jamendo is being translated in 10 languages so we have to deal with i18n issues all the time.

I took some time to choose a solution to achieve it. I finally decided to use a different “Discussion” table for each language. I patched Framework.Functions.php / GetTableName() to add the language identifier when appropriate. (For LUM_Discussion, LUM_DiscussionWatch, LUM_Bookmark, LUM_Comment, and maybe whispers but I didn’t activate the feature)

6. Other patches ================

Here is a list of the misc. patches I had to make :

• Vanilla.Class.DiscussionManager / SaveDiscussion() : Save the newly posted discussionID somewhere.