Integrating 3rd party forum software with my own code

Question

I'm about to start a new PHP project and I'm going to need to make use of 3rd party forum software.

What's the best way to tackle integration of the forum into my code? Things like user authentication, having the user only have to login once, etc.

I'll be using the CodeIgniter framework if that is of any help. I found the article on integrating Vanilla with CL Auth & CodeIgniter but it wasn't to my liking at all.

Does anyone have any specific recommendations on PHP forum software? I'm open to any suggestions or pointers/help.

Answer 1

In my experience Simple Machines Forums is relatively easy to integrate into existing code.

What comes to authentication, it may be easiest for you to use the forum's authentication in your application, rather than attempting to use your application's authentication in the forum. It doesn't matter which forum you choose to use - this is usually the esiest way, since forums tend to have complex code related to auth and access, which can be tricky to modify to use some other system.

Answer 2

I'm not real familiar with any particular forum software, but my advice when using and integrating 3rd party software is to try and abstract out the specifics as much as possible from your main code base.

Wrap your forum library calls for things such as authentication, etc so that if you need to later change your forum software, you can limit the scope of the changes.