Best ruby on rails Forum system OR best Forum for integrating with a Rails app?

Question

I'm looking for advice on the current best forum/community/bulletin board system written in Rails for integration into an existing Rails app.

I'm also open to non-Rails forums that can be integrated with my Rails app & authentication without too much trouble.

Any advice?

I did a bit of research and found answers from more than a year ago - have better solutions come about since? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2549/what-is-good-forum-software-to-add-to-an-existing-rails-application

Someone semi-recently blogged about choosing to integrate punBB (PHP): craigjolicoeur.com/blog/how-to-integrate-punbb-into-an-existing-ruby-on-rails-application

Answer 1

I would encourage you to give http://github.com/radar/rboard a go, but that may be a biased opinion. Integrating any application into another is always a less-than-fun experience.

Answer 2

I had to do this very thing a couple of months ago. After some research I concluded it would be simpler, faster, and more robust to write the forum code myself in my existing app than to try to integrate another forum system.

All you need are three resources: forums, topics, posts -- each one following the Rails REST/resource conventions. You could write the code and tests in just a few hours, and by definition it will all integrate perfectly into your existing app. And you'll know exactly how to extend it, as and when you need to, because you wrote the code.

If you try to integrate a separate forum app, you have to worry about unifying the user models, the authentication, and so on. As/when you need to alter it, you have to figure out how somebody else's code works. Much easier (with Rails) just to build onto what you already have.

You'd think in this day and age we'd be able to drop in a forum system pretty easily. After all, forums themselves aren't rocket science. But somehow with Rails it's just quicker to write it yourself.

If you're interested you can see my results here. I'd be happy to send you the code.

Answer 3

Or have a look at http://github.com/technoweenie/altered%5Fbeast

Answer 4

I would not recommend using Beast in any case.

I've had some terrible experience with implementing Savage Beast as plugin into my app. It's nightmare to adapt it to your application design (~950 lines in display.css with poor commenting, templates, I'd say, are also far from perfect), also it has some flaws with methods implementation. When I started to integrate Beast into my application, after 3 hours of headache I realized, that I could have written my forum using that time.

To look at the problem from high altitude:

1. If you need simple forum solution - use nifty generators. Problem will be solved in hour or two.
2. If you need advanced forum solution (moderators, themes, personalization, etc...) - use professionally programmed forum in other language (PHP,, etc...). You will spend some more time adapting it to your app, but you will have some real thing.

P.S. Hell, if I would have some more spare time, I would write my own forum plugin for Rails/Merb community.

P.P.S. That was my personal opinion :) In any case I appreciate Beast developer's hard work. Damn, he was doing it for free.