[pmwiki-users] Integrating PmWiki and phpBB2 - site aggregation

Kathryn Andersen kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org
Sun Jan 28 03:50:25 CST 2007


On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 09:11:10AM -0000, Crisp, Steve [UK] wrote:
> I'm still trying to integrate PmWiki and phpBB2 so users think its the
> same site.  The site has a simple structure, header, sidebar, content
> and footer.  The idea is to use PmWiki as the main site and switch out
> to phpBB2 when users click 'forum' in the sidebar.  Sounds simple, but
> the things I've done so far (see below) are not working well and I'm
> looking for advice.

I must admit, I would think that the simplest method, if possible, would
be to make them completely separate, but design identical skins for
them.  That's what I did for my own site, www.katspace.org; most of the
pages use a CMS based on Embperl, but some sections of the site use
PmWiki with CleanUrls.  I used Apache rewrite to hide the difference
even more, but that was mainly because I didn't want broken links.

For example, the reviews section http://www.katspace.org/reviews/
uses my CMS, but http://www.katspace.org/reviews/Books/ is actually
using PmWiki, with the following Apache rewrite rules to hide its
real location:

# rewrite rules /reviews/Books/ -> /revstuff/Books/
RewriteRule ^/reviews/Books$
/var/www/katspace/reviewswiki/index.php?n=Books.Books [QSA] [L]
RewriteRule ^/reviews/Books/$
/var/www/katspace/reviewswiki/index.php?n=Books.Books [QSA] [L]
RewriteRule ^/reviews/Books/(.*)$
/var/www/katspace/reviewswiki/index.php?n=Books.$1 [QSA] [L]

The actual books "wiki" is at
http://www.katspace.org/revstuff/Books/Books

using Apache Alias commands to say where the wiki directory actually is:

Alias /revstuff/pub /var/www/katspace/reviewswiki/pub
Alias /revstuff/uploads /var/www/katspace/reviewswiki/uploads
Alias /revstuff /var/www/katspace/reviewswiki/index.php

Anyway, my original point is that http://www.katspace.org/reviews/
*looks* the same as http://www.katspace.org/revstuff/Books/Books
because I made a PmWiki skin which matched the template I was using for
the main reviews page.

Of course, the downside of this approach is that you're going to have
some duplication of effort, since you'll need to create one skin +
sidebar for the PmWiki part of your site, and another skin + sidebar for
the phpBB2 part of the site.  Of course, this won't work if it isn't
possible to make a phpBB2 skin that looks like the PmWiki skin, but I
don't get that impression from the looks of your site...

Kathryn Andersen
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