I haven’t posted here for months, but I had lunch with Maoman a while back and the continuing difficulties with the Taiwanted logins came up in conversation.
I’ve dabbled, a little, and found a semi-solution. It’s not the solution by any means, but it’s worth sharing. There must be other solutions out there, and hopefully this will prompt others to share what they know and get this thing working. Skip the next three paragraphs if you know the basics.
For the uninitiated, forumosa is ‘managed’ by a computer program which runs continuously on the server. The prgram takes everything you write and puts it into a database, then pulls it out and displays it to anyone who asks to see it. Every page you see is created specially for you on demand, and formatted according to a template. So there’s no ‘design’ necessary for the site owners.
The software is phpBB, which is free! Anyone can download it, and then you change the appearance of the site by changing the template, not the software. (OK, you can also change the software, so that it displays different stuff too.)
There are lots of different softwares out there, mostly free, and all having their own specialised purposes. phpBB is for forums, and Taiwanted uses another software that was written especially for showing ads. The problem is that software should protect user details and passwords, so it’s hard to make them talk to each other. Taiwanted and forumosa don’t want to share information.
I occasionally dabble with another software, called Joomla. Joomla was originally for creating ‘brochure’ type websites, but over the years many people have written extensions for it that provide additional functionalities. Most of the software is available for free, and is reasonably easy to use. (reasonably is not the same as very!)
Anyway, there is an extension out there that allows Joomla websites to synchronise user data with phpBB. I played around with a virgin installation of both softwares for a while, and successfully managed to shunt 15,000 (made-up) users between the two. Basically, if you register or login at the joomla site then you’re also registered/logged in at the phpbb site immediately. It does what Taiwanted doesn’t do.
So this means you can share users and use the Joomla functionalities on another site. Unfortunately, there’s no perfect advertising component for joomla but I found three free candidates and put them all onto a simple demo site - with an empty phpbb forum associated with it. Each one has different drawbacks, and none is perfect. But at least they offer a quick fix that actually works until someone figures out something more perfect. Feel free to register and play with them.
development.ingeniousity.net/newflob/home
Note, the content on the site is just sample data as provided by the authors. I threw a video onto the front page just to show that it could be done easily and added a few categories for content, but basically it’s just a test-bed and will be deleted later. For the hell of it, I’ve made given authoring privileges to anyone registering, which means you can create articles in any existing category. I’ve also enabled three different commenting systems which allow users to leave feedback on articles.
The components added at the moment are:
- a phpBB forum with synchronised user database
- Almond ads system, which doesn’t require user registration and seems very powerful
- Aardvertiser ads, which is very simple and no use for jobs or personals
- Ads manager, which seems to be the most configurable and also requires registration
- K2, which is a configurable, expandable content system which allows you to add extra fields. (It’s pure geekware, with almost no documentation although I saw an interesting video about it joomlashack.com/joomla-compo … deo-review)
It’s all very ugly right now, due to me not having time to play with the settings and config files or add funky graphi stuff. If anyone knows a bit about this and wants to play then email me for an admin password. I really don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for sitting down and figuring out what the fields should be for different ad categories. But the whole project is completely do-able for anyone who is marginally more intelligent than my dog. Even Sandman could probably figure it out.