Symphony.

I've been away since v.2 was beta. Congrats. Looking forward to trying a site with this, which I thought the most promising new CMS out there. (I've been using ExpressionEngine otherwise.)

I remember seeing a comment here maybe a year ago or so from one of the devs about a forum component that had been developed natively in Symphony 2. Is that still a reality?

Commenting on my own post. Here's the forum thread from roughly June 2008 (not as long ago as I thought):

http://archive.overture21.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1726

A few ideas were thrown about and a prototype existed, but this was with a beta version of 2.0 and I imagine a fair amount has changed since then. There is still work to be done on building a solid user management extension. Once that is complete, I imagine building a forum on top of this would be easier than trying from scratch.

Nick, thanks. As you can see from Allen's original post about this, he made it sound like a done deal that was going to ship with Symphony 2. That's what I was remembering. Anyway...

I've been reading your own site. Very nice, very useful. Cheers.

Personally, my ideal would be easy integration of the Vanilla forum as it's my forum of choice. If someone was to create an extension that allowed for easy integration of Symphony and Vanilla I'd be extremely interested.

The Vanilla developers do indeed seem to have all-round taste on a high level similar to the folks behind Symphony. (For contrast, spend five minutes at drupal.org.) Yet it seems a shame to integrate a third-party forum into a framework like Symphony.

If Vanilla's codebase is so good, maybe a genuinely "Symphonized" Vanilla is possible, rather than simply an "integrated" Vanilla. What would that mean and how would it be done? I frankly don't know, being brand-new here. The idea would be: a true Symphony-based forum but leveraging all the good concepts and even actual PHP of Vanilla to lessen the work. That might even leave Vanilla add-ons usable. But this is completely ignorant speculation on my part.

I do know, however, that "bridges" between CMS's and Forums are a pain. A pain to configure and keep in sync, a pain to maintain over time as the two codebases go in different directions, etc. At the very least, I'd want to see a genuine sharing of one set of user-account data. If users are required to log-in to leave a comment on a blog post, that log-in is identical to the log-in for making Forum posts. And of course there's only one user "profile" page, etc. Everything about registering and logging in is one. That's what I would require of both "integrated" and "Symphonized."

By the way, the "Manage my account" link in the left sidebar (which seems to be the Symphony account) is broken at the moment. The "Account" link at the top of the page, which clearly belongs to Vanilla, works but the profile appears not to be editable. I'd like to get email notifications of new posts in threads where I'm posting, but I can't do that right now, apparently.

And if I could preview forum posts, I'd do that right now before committing this. I assume that Vanilla (or one of its add-ons) can do that.

I agree with spacewalk's sentiments. Vanilla is a dedicated forum platform and it does it well. Symphony is a content management/publishing platform, and it does it well. I see little point in rebuilding Vanilla on top of Symphony.

However I certainly see merit in some form of bridge. Vanilla publishes RSS feeds, and Symphony loves XML, so there's a link. As for user management, Vanilla already does this well, so I wonder whether there could be an extension to Symphony in the form of an event which looks up a cookie in the Vanilla database and inserts the user information into the XML, to share user information.

This way the user management is kept within the realms of Vanilla, but Symphony pages are privy to the information as well.

The problem with this is that you're tied to Vanilla. One could fork and produce a variant for phpBB, VBulletin and the plethora of others, but spacewalk makes the good point about maintenance over time. How does one cater for the developer who has no desire to install another forum software and simply wants a forum in their Symphony site?

I have built some Vanilla Forums for Symphony websites, and it was always rather hard to get the design working, because Vanilla's Themes have little to do with things you know from Symphony. But in the end I am rather lucky with those forums.

I'd love to have "community-like" user management in Symphony. This would be the first big step to building forums with Symphony.

BTW: Right now I'd think twice before building a Vanilla Forum, just because Vanilla 2 is around the corner. It is supposed to work even faster, and it will be built on Mark O'Sullivan's new MVC PHP framework called Garden. (Mark is the one who created Vanilla.) Sounds very interesting. There are around ten articles about Garden and Vanilla 2 on Mark's Blog.

Nick, your post motivates me to paste in here Allen's archived comment from only 7-8 months ago (June 2008). It's short. He said:

"We've developed a functioning forum in Symphony 2 using 90% of Symphony's built in features (sections, fields and events). 10% of it are custom data sources and events which are introduced to the system as an extension. We plan to release this as a package when Symphony 2 final is released."

That's a very clear straightforward statement. Back then I went on to ask Allen if this forum had any of the normal features like threaded discussion, subscribing to a thread, etc. and I never had an answer. But still, it existed in some functioning state and was 100% accomplished with Symphony's native features.

Now, I realize that some significant technical changes occurred between Symphony v. 2 beta and the release, but could things have changed so much that the whole concept of a native forum is now off the table? That doesn't seem to make sense.

Allen?

I'm not suggesting it's off the table per se; but rebuilding Vanilla in Symphony is a lot of work!

I'd be very interested to see what we can put together with respect to a basic forum. The custom functionality would be to handle user management. There does exist a Front End Authentication extension, but I think once a full-featured user management extension exists (using a section, logjn/register, forgotten password etc.) a forum would surely follow.

The customisations would have used custom SQL and database lookups, and I'm aware that the way in which Alistair codes these have changed substantially in the last few months, now the Select Box Link has replaced the original Section Link, and he has released ASDC (a database connector that has better performance).

If we could get a feature list of what the original had then maybe we could assess how tricky it'd be to upgrade this to standard 2.0+ code?

I'm in no way against it, just conscious of re-inventing the wheel :-)

Those thoughts sound very sane. I frankly don't understand Symphony's capabilities well enough to grasp the challenge of doing this natively. From what you're saying, it does sound like much more work than I appreciated from Allen's original post.

Actually, your comments have me wondering about user management, which is almost a digression off this forum topic, but actually quite relevant.

Is it not possible for a user to self-register in Symphony out of the box, or with already-developed extensions? I don't mean that the newly registered person would have authorship or blogging status necessarily, but many site owners want the option to build community by being able to require membership to participate at all--including commenting on the official blog posts.