By robby1066 on

I just got asked by a client to replace his existing drupal forums with phpbb. There doesn't have to be any interaction between the forums and the rest of the site, so I think it should be pretty easy.

My question before I go ahead with the install of phpbb is, are there any issues with installing phpbb and drupal in the same db? Is there a prefix to the tables in phpbb? (example: phpbb_variables instead of just variables). I just wanted to check to see if anyone had experiance with this stuff. I really don't want to mess up my drupal install.

Thanks!

Comments

Stefan Nagtegaal’s picture

Stefan Nagtegaal commented

Search first in the forums before you ask a new question..
This question has been asked a lot of times before you did..

robby1066’s picture

robby1066 commented

Hey Thanks a lot! considering I already went through the forums for about 20 minutes before I posted that, your comment REALLY helps me out...

how bout a link to a forum topic or something? maybe I was searching with the wrong words or something, but all I came up with was posts about integrating drupal with phpbb, which isn't what I need... I just needed to know if phpbb installed on the same database would break drupal... that's it.

robert castelo’s picture

robert castelo commented

You can add a prefix to all tables in the Drupal database, look at the bottom of your includes/conf.php file. I think PHPBB also allows you to do this. So you will be able to avoid table name conflicts.

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robby1066’s picture

robby1066 commented

thanks!

simonth’s picture

simonth commented

other than specifying the prefix for your tables, also u will need to modify the create tables script to change all the tables names to the new names with ur prefix,

e.g.
users -> dp_users (where dp_ is ur prefix)

mbacas’s picture

mbacas commented

Why not just create a new phpBB database and keep the 2 separate? That's what I did when I went from phpBB to Drupal.

Another question, why their decision to replace Drupal with phpBB? Was there some feature or function that was needed or different?

- Mark

robby1066’s picture

robby1066 commented

>>>Why not just create a new phpBB database and keep the 2 separate? That's what I did when I went from phpBB to Drupal.

That would certianly be the easiest, and best route. But the hosting plan he's on only allows 1 database, so that's what I have to work with.

>>>Another question, why their decision to replace Drupal with phpBB? Was there some feature or function that was needed or different?

I tried hard to get that info out of him. He couldn't really name any specific features, which wasn't very helpful. He kept on saying that there were tons of "little" features missing that he thinks should be in a forum system and he didn't like the way it was formatted. I spent a little bit of time telling him how pretty much all the formatting stuff could be tweaked and it would be easier to do that than install phpBB. But if you knew this guy... haha... he's a little stubborn and got it stuck in his head that he HAS to have phpBB. And he's willing to pay for me to install and configure it, and doesn't mind that it's an extra web app that he has to admin. So I've ONLY had experience with drupal as a forum program at this point, so it seems like a good opportunity for me to learn a little bit about a different system.

jabevan’s picture

jabevan commented

"Another question, why their decision to replace Drupal with phpBB? Was there some feature or function that was needed or different?"

I'm brand new to Drupal (I just found it today), but I'd say right off that the forum seems to be lacking stull like basic quote, easy text formatting, NOTIFICATIONS (!), and PRIVATE MESSAGING (!).

I think all of these are critical to any forum, especially the last two for any cutting edge forums.

Just my thoughts. Still looking around....

JAB*

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

notifications and private messaing are available as contrib modules. No need to litter a forum with it.

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jabevan’s picture

jabevan commented

Thanks, I'll check them out.

I just noticed that you can't edit your postings either. Is their a contribution for that? Any contributions for text formatting? I like the HTML tags myself, but the average user tends to get confused by anything more than the [B] and [I] buttons...

On the up note, I extensively compared five dozen or so CMS packages for my latest project and Drupal rose to the top.

I have (unfortunate) experience with PHP-Nuke and just started building a XOOPS site. I don't have much good to say about PHP-Nuke. I do like the quality codebase for XOOPS and its strong community. I think there is a fine line between (slashdot) news sites and (blg/forum based) community sites. XOOPS seems to excel at the news site and Drupal seems to take its angle from the community site.

I'm definitely going to dig deeper. I'm hoping to find a good solution that I can commit to for all my projects (members only non-profit site, niche community/news site, intranet, artist community, etc).

...

JAB*

p.s. Also, I noticed there really isn't a way to contribute to the Drupal project. I'm in the fortunate position of having some corporate backing and would definitely want to contribute to whichever CMS ends up being my best solution.

~~~~~~~~~~EDIT~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Weird, I just noticed that I can edit this comment but I can't (/couldn't) edit my previous comment???

marky’s picture

marky commented

Any contributions for text formatting?

You could investigate using the bbcode, textile or htmlarea modules as alternatives.

Weird, I just noticed that I can edit this comment but I can't (/couldn't) edit my previous comment???

You can edit your comment to your heart's content until it gets a reply. You can probably see why this is a good idea™... ;)

/marky

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

There is a html editor called htmleditor available. If you mean contributing as "funding", we should set something up like this, I think. Any recommendations besides Paypal?

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