I need to integrate a forum in existing cakePHP website

Need Help
1

Hello,
i have a cakePHP website with users table creadentials and i want to integrate a forum like phpBB or another.
i dont know the best way to do this, in order to allow users to directly connect to the forum, without having to authenticate again…
do you know a plugin or a type of forum adapted to connect with cakePHP ?

I did a lot of research and couldn’t find anything conclusive

2

As a first step, have you looked for any Forum software based on cake. Wouldn’t hurt to check.

3

Did you not like the response you got here?

4

the proposed solution seems to be complex especially since I do not know what is expected by phpBB. This is why, before going more far in this way, I came here to ask the cakePHP community if there was not already something

5

I have done this a few times in the past. It’s been a while, but as I recall, my approach was:

  1. Create a subdomain to host the forum
  2. Use the same database connection for both
  3. Edit your CakePHP user’s table contain all the fields the forum needs. Tweak your CakePHP application to leverage overlapping field names according to the forum’s field name requirements
  4. Edit your CakePHP application to set cookies across all subdomains. Figure out cookies forum needs to have — and set those from CakePHP (use Application.php likely for this). Optionally: also figure out where cookies are being set in the forum package software when users log in and edit those routines to also set cookies that your CakePHP app needs to recognize a user as logged in.
  5. You obviously will need to edit your forum’s layout files to match the look of your main site, which will require balancing CSS as well so that classes critical to the function of the forum don’t collide with classes desired for a certain look/feel/layout.
6

I used phpBB for this as well. It’s been a long time, so I can’t reliably comment on details which have likely changed. But it was possible and took me about two weeks to go from not knowing if it was even possible to a finished product.

The second time I did it was much faster and easier – but I also didn’t care as much about having the forum look radically different from its default. The first time it had been for an MMORPG guild site; I wanted the forum to be unique and distinct; to look like it belonged with everything else about the main site; to look like it wasn’t even a phpBB product. The second time I didn’t care about that level of change… it was more utilitarian… so, much less customization needed.

7

Thanks for your feedback. In my case I just want SSO between cakePHP and the forum, i dont care about style. I saw that now there are “Authentication providers” to implement on the phpBB side … I will try to look at this. Otherwise I will turn to your tip for using cookies with a common database