Best way to integrate PHP forum into Django site?

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+1 Q:

Best way to integrate PHP forum into Django site?

Suppose you are running a Django site, and have a legacy PHP forum to support and integrate into your site, since current Django forum solutions are not mature enough.

What is the best way to do this?

Currently I have a simple view, which renders a very simple template which extends my site's base template, and the content area has nothing but an <IFRAME> which holds the forum as its src. A small jQuery function is used to maximize the <IFRAME>'s height (once it finishes loading) so as to contain 100% of the forum content.

But all of this sounds pretty awkward. How would you go about this?

+3 A:

There are a few options. None are ideal (but mixing two platforms never is!)

Use iframes as you've suggested (bad as the address in the address bar is always that of the django page and if somebody copes a link off the forum, it will be the PHP forum, not the django holder)
Use iframes but instead of using the same src all the time, parse the URL and append the relative bit onto the src of the iframe. ie if django sees /forum/this-url, set the src to http://forum-address/this-url and make sure all your links target parent. This has the advantage of showing the correct link in the address bar at all times (rather than it always being /forum/). You'll need to hack your forum for this to work.
Proxy the content and inject it into the page properly. You'll need to pass cookies and it might get really messy but in most terms, this is a great way to integrate things because your links will always be correct. You'll need to butcher your forum theme to strip out everything outside and including the <body> tags.
Theme your forum in the same way as the Django site. This would give best performance but you might have issues if you use dynamic stuff in your django template. An option to get around this is by having the django template cache things to memcache and using php-memcache to pull them out into your forum template.

I have done both 3 and 4 in the past. I used 3 for a very simple form (so didn't have to deal with cookies and sessions as you will). I used 4 for integrating a FluxBB forum into a Wordpress install. Both PHP but it would be uber bloat to load FluxBB inside Wordpress. I cached the dynamic template things into memcache and pulled them out in the forum template.

For this, I would probably suggest going with #4. It's a pain in the arse having to maintain two themes but it's by far the fastest performing solution.

Oli 2009-05-23 20:04:18

When I read the question summary I immediately thought that you would need some kind of script, which could be linked to a signal via the Dispatcher in Django, to syncronize the user database from your Django site to the forum. This would keep the authentication side of things in check - but you still need to do one of the things that Oli has suggested, to make them look the same.

Themeing will probably be the least hassle-free route, but that's not to say it will be easy!

Rob Golding 2009-05-23 20:15:33

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Best way to integrate PHP forum into Django site?

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