What is the best forum plug-in solution for the Symfony framework?

Question

I'm looking for a good solution to integrate a forum into a symfony application.

Something like phpBB would be excellent. I've seen phpBB plugins to integrate with symfony but that's not enough for my purposes, also, mapping database tables is a lame approach in my opinion.

If anybody knows a good working forum component for Symfony then I would really apreciate it. :)

Also, it needs to work with Doctrine.

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are a couple of forums which use the Symfony frmaework. They are listed on the Symfony forum plugins page.

The most popular is the sfSimpleForum, which was built by Francois Zaninotto, one of the original Symfony developers.

There is little development in this area however, possibly because forums are the 'old' way of allowing users interact online and are gradually being replaced with new techniques.

Answer 2

If you're discounting the prestaForumConnectorPlugin which connects sfGuard and PHPBB3, then you may have to write your own connector. You should check if any resources exist on the websites of your favourite PHP forum.

One option is Invision Power Board (IPB) v3, as their developer resources explain how to integrate your own code (ie. symfony) into their system, including single sign-on: http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/official.html?category=41

I have integrated IPB v2 with symfony, and it wasn't ideal - there was no developer interface at that time to make IPB respect symfony. I had to hack around in the IPB source to make it work, but after discussing it with Invision was assured this would not be necessary with v3. This seems to now exist, which would be where I would start.

NB. IPB is not free, so hopefully this is not a sticking point for you.

Answer 3

I've found sfDoctrineSimpleForumPlugin Thanks for all the responses, hope this works :) ! The author made even some changes today after this post

Answer 4

I've integrated Phorum with symfony before - there's some old and semi-out of date documentation on the web for doing this, but essentially Phorum has an architecture that allows its user authentication to be easily overridden. You will then need to write a controller to wrap the forum calls too, and apply the main site templating (if you need that).