Dutch Gay youth club; UseBB forum integration

[gertvdijk]

Three months ago I was asked to do a voluntary job. It involved creating a new website for a gay youth club in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Just over a month ago the development came to a point of 'live', but at this moment it has not yet been finished. But a good, dynamic website is never finished.
Link: http://apollo-rotterdam.nl (in Dutch, unfortunately)

Several things had to be implemented:
- Overview of upcoming activities.
- Contact form
- Discussion forum for the members (integrated in the website)
- Easy navigation, clean and tidy lay-out

In addition to the front-end website, I also needed to do some modifications to the admin area, so that the people on the committee can do modifications and updates themselves. Those people are not technical in any way, but it isn't too bad after all.

A visual design (image) was already made by someone much more creative than I am. So I don't take any responsibilities in that part. But I have made the html/css/js template of course.

I tried to 'implement' phpBB3 by just making a similar template for it and include some CMSMS pages just by a file_get_contents() function in php. The main problem that arised, was that phpBB3 features way too much for this kind of sites, so that it would take me too much time to redo all the templates in phpBB3 and to reconsider all of its features.
So I switched to UseBB, which suites better in any way. It was a simple job to make a template so that a normal visitor wouldn't notice it has moved from the CMSMS software to that of UseBB. Great software (both CMSMS and UseBB).

Another project I did, that had nothing to do with the one mentioned above: http://stukadoorsbedrijfvanamstel.nl (in Dutch as well)

[monghidi]

I like the look a lot. I especially think the forum integration is very seamless and well done. Can you say more about how you have 'integrated' the UseBB and CMSMS together?

Thanks!

[gertvdijk]

I just didn't integrate UseBB in CMSMS, but quite the other way around. The template system of UseBB is just plain php, so that gave me the oppurtunity to include data from the CMS (news, agenda, website navigation), just by including with the file_get_contents() function in php. I've set up a few 'special' pages, which don't appear in the navigation and don't use the website template, but just a template with {content}. The 'special' pages then just include the data I want to include in the UseBB template.

So, basically, UseBB accesses (for example with the 'agenda items') http://apollo-rotterdam.nl/_forum-agenda-items and puts the output of the webserver in the right place in the UseBB template.

The next step will be the other way around: last posts on the forum on the website. What I want to do is to parse the RSS feed of the forum and put the last five posts in the 'Forum' box on the website. But I will have to build my own CMSMS module for that I think, which would be my first one. Or does someone already have a module to parse RSS feeds?

[Dr.CSS]

Search in the forge RSS, development tab above, to find a couple...

[gertvdijk]

Search in the forge RSS, development tab above, to find a couple...

Yeah, but I assumed too quickly that all of those modules would just create RSS feeds, rather than parse from external sources. (my bad)
But hey... Pirrs (http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/pirss/) is working great! In just a few minutes I have a working setup already! Now just tuning some character encoding settings. The forum is iso8859-1 and CMSMS is set to UTF-8, so I need to verify it is working correctly first.
Its working http://apollo-rotterdam.nl/
I added some code to provide the long topic subjects to be chopped at a given character length, with input (max length) given via parameters (like the url) and for the data being chopped, I add an ellipsis (triple dot). Quite an elegant result, though I say that myself. Perhaps I could help the Pirss plugin by providing that piece of code.
Now another little problem arises: the server own's IP address shows up in the list of online users on the forum, as a guest requesting the RSS feed. Later, I will customize UseBB to hide acitivity from the server's own IP.

Thanks!