My Portal's MSSQL and vBulletin's MySQL - php

I have developed a Portal using Microsoft ASP.NET and MSSQL. Now, I want to include vBulletin to my site for that purpose I need to have PHP and MySQL(or MSSQL will do?). With single login feature for both the Portal and Forum.
I have hosted my site on Dedicated IIS webserver hosted on MS Server 2008.
I can install PHP on it. (and MySQL too if required)
The problem here is how can I integrate the user's of my portal with vBulletin forum??
Is there any way to Install vBulletin using IIS+PHP+MSSQL?
or
I have to use IIS+PHP+MysQL and integrate users of users of both the databases? (HOW?)

At the moment vBulletin only supports MySQL. There is talk of adding support for other databases however right now with all versions of VB MySQL is your only option. So without heavily modifying VB this cannot use MSSQL (in fact I would strongly recommend that you don't even try embarking on that)
The other complication is that you are using two different code frameworks, PHP for vBulletin and ASP.NET (C#?) for your portal. All these frameworks can sit together on the same dedicate box but you need them to communicate with each other.
With all this in mind the easiest way of having SSO across the two platforms (portal & vbulletin) would be to use the vBulletin user table in MySQL for your portal authentication. There is a .NET MySQL driver that you can use for this purpose and running the necessary queries via that, from ASP.NET, should be fairly simple.
The only other thing that you will have to consider is a user logging in on your portal page not having to relog when they go to the forums. This can be done by setting cookies etc so you will have to look at vBulletins login.php script to work out how these are handled.
There is also another option, that you may or may not want to consider (depending on how much work you have put into your portal ;)). There is already a free portal product for vBulletin called vbAdvanced:
http://www.vbadvanced.com/
This may already meet your portal requirements and is developed specifically for vBulletin.

Related

Share session between two systems in Zend Framework v1

I'm facing an issue that's beyond my Zend Framework knowledge, i hope you guys could help.
I have a old fully-functional system installed in my server (let's call it http://stable.server.com), which has a very old PHP version. I'm planning to upgrade my PHP version to the latest (and hopefully in a few months, to 7!) but my code uses a lot of deprecated functions and has some code that isn't valid for PHP 5.6 but it was for older versions. I've made a division of modules in order to migrate each module, test it and then upload it to a parallel server with the latest PHP version (let's call it http://updated.server.com). Of course each one has a different Zend installation, with the same version and configuration file.
Of course those modules has some communication between themselves, and I want to keep the change the most transparent for my users. So when I call from updated.server.com to stable.server.com and viceversa, my app asks me to login again. When I'm logged in the two systems, this communication goes straight, but I want to avoid the users to login again.
¿Any of you have made something like this? I'd like of course a secure way to avoid that login between systems, so nobody could mount a fake system and login from it.
Thank you all in advance.
I think you are looking at the two different problem.
Session is written on disk this information needs to be shared between two servers.
Cookie needs to be persistent through out the domain/subdomain.
for session sharing you can use mysql session storage.
http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/zend.session.savehandler.dbtable.html
http://framework.zend.com/manual/1.12/en/learning.multiuser.sessions.html
https://github.com/sprain/PHP-MySQL-Session-Handler/blob/master/MySqlSessionHandler.php
you can google it there are so many solution out there.
2.Domain set cookie for subdomain
you can set your cookie to be ".server.com" then it will live through out of your all domains.
This is not simple fix!! but once you are done with this implementation you can run both version at the same time on different machine with same session information.

does web framework requires unique hosting

a very simple or stupid question may be...but i would like to know that these web framewrok require unique host or any php host can be used to get my site hosted.
what i mean is that there are certain host that are wordpress hosting and blah blah...so if i use framework like codeigniter, yii, zend....do they also require such host or any web host can be used which provide php hosting. previously i have developed two sites both are non framework based static site so i simply uploaded them on web host and enjoyed my work but now i m using codeigniter for my new site (my first framework ) . so this time do i need other host or any php host can provide it ....
PHP frameworks are written in PHP themselves, and can be ran on any PHP host.
Things to watch out for are frameworks that require specific versions of PHP. Most frameworks these days simply require PHP 5.3 or greater, which most hosts provide.
Also, there are some for-pay PHP applications that encrypt their source code with tools like ionCube. These would require special hosting, but are rare.
Short answer
No, there is no link between a web hosting and a framework except the obvious for example the web host should support php for codeigniter to run.
Long answer
Frameworks are nothing special. It is just pre-written php code which you can use. Example codeIgniter is just some php code. And so is web apps like wordpress. They all are nothing but just some php code. So all your web hosting service requires is to support recent versions of php
Any advertisement done by webhosting services about how they support wordpress and stuff are just marketing gimmicks. Any of the top rated webhosting service can prety much support any of the top rated php frameworks and web-apps
If you still want to be sure that if your webhosting service can run a particular php script, you can look up the requirements. Here are the requirements for:
CodeIgniter
WordPress
Yii
Joomla
CakePHP
As you can see here, most of them if not all of them, require you to have php 5 and some sort of database. Typicaly MySQL. These two requirements are pretty standard with most php web-hosting services

Can Drupal be used as a shell for custom web apps?

I am looking to create a web site that will need to exchange information with a Filemaker Pro (version 11) database. Using PHP I can create simple web apps that submit and retrieve data from Filemaker. I would however like to use a CMS framework (such as Drupal) to allow users to control access to the site and update site content (blog posts, images, etc ...).
Is it possible to use Drupal as a "shell", controlling access to certain pages and allowing site editors to modify content, while embedding a PHP page/form to interact with the Filemaker data? I would be planning to use MySQL for Drupal and the custom "web apps" would access Filemaker. Thanks for any help.
Have you ever heard of the expression "there's a module for that?" It's used quite a bit in the Drupal world. And yes, for Filemaker, there is a Module for That!. It's called, the Filemaker module, see more detail at http://drupal.org/project/filemaker.
Now I've never tested it, so it may not give you everything you want. But the beauty of open source is that you can always contribute what it doesn't already have. Or at least see how they did it to see if its worth it for you to try your own integration.
Now this module is one version behind current, so maybe you can learn Drupal by learning to upgrade the module. There's great guides on how to do this.

MySQL, PHP based website statistics

Trying to integrate something like tracewatch into admin panel of my PHP, MySQL based website.
But I need 1 page solution, not heavy system like twatch with user management.
I wonder, is there any simple php class or mini app for this purpose (want to get something like this on admin page)?
There are bunch of tracewatch alternatives. Here are somes:
Piwik
Piwik is an open-source Web analytics application developed using PHP and MySQL. It has a "plugins" system that allows for utmost extensibility and customization. Install only the plugins you need or go overboard and install them all – the choice is up to you. The plugins system, as you can imagine, also opens up possibilities for you to create your own custom extensions. This thing’s lightweight – the download’s only 1.9MB.
FireStats
FireStats is a simple and straight-forward Web analytics application written in PHP/MySQL. It supports numerous platforms and set-ups including C# sites, Django sites, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and several others. Are you a resourceful developer who needs moar cowbell? FireStats has an excellent API that will assist you in creating your own custom apps or publishing platform components (imagine: displaying the top 10 most downloaded files in your WordPress site) based on your FireStats data.
JAWStats
JAWStats is a server-based Web analytics application that runs with the popular AWStats (in fact, if you’re on a shared hosting plan – AWStats is probably already installed). JAWStats does two things to extend AWStats – it improves performance by reducing server resource usage and improves the user interface a little bit. With that said, you can’t go wrong with just using AWStats either if you’re happy with it.
SimpleStats
Simple Stats is a PHP based, web analytics utility designed to enable you in monitoring visits on your website. It is very simple to install, and it's interface goes straight to the important facts such as the Google search queries (understand "the search expressions in Google") that your visitors might have used to browse to your website.
You could try Piwik. You can access features using an API or embed a widget via iframe.

Need to Assess whether Joomla is good fit for Web Application Requirement

I have a web application that needs to be built using PHP/MySQL. The application will require documents to be generated from data in the MySQL database. Such documents will be printed and/or emailed and user will be prompted to run a daily print/email job based on business logic.
This application functionality needs to be made available to individual users such that they can upload data, have the system prompt them as to whether letters/emails are to be generated. The site also needs to be able to support a bulletin board, online live training events and will have admin area as well.
Question: Should a hybrid solution be developed such that the data management (upload functionality, and letter production) be a separate part of the site that authenticated Joomla users can access? That is, the document management functionality would exist separately from Joomla, but be called from within it via a link in the Joomla sitemap. Alternatively, should custom modules be developed from within Joomla to accomodate the document management functionality?
Thanks so much for your input!!
Joomla could do the job for you but based on the amount of things you need that differ from a normal Joomla site I would use a framework to build from instead of a CMS. I say this because it sounds like you need a lot more than just a CMS and it can be more work if you try making Joomla do things it wasn't designed to do. In my opinion Joomla is for "web sites" and not as much for "web apps". Of course those terms have overlap but it sounds like you would be better off with a Framework to go off of instead of working around Joomla to get what you want. However if the site is already done in Joomla it may be less work just to make a Joomla add-on.
Since you have to use PHP I would definitely recommend CakePHP for your framework. As for an integrated forum try looking at the links in this post. If that doesn't work for you, try out Vanilla forums (vanillaforums.org) which are very clean and may be easier to integrate into CakePHP than some of the other PHP forums.
If you decide to use CakePHP, check out Cake Forge to see if you can find anything there to make your life even easier.
If you were to use Joomla, the upload functionality and letter production would be written as a custom component. You can write the component to make sure that the current user is authenticated before generating the documents. I would not develop this as a separate application alongside Joomla; it would be easier to write it as a component.
Many forums and forum bridges are available for Joomla, so that would be something you wouldn't have to write.
I'm not sure what kind of live event support you're looking for.

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