My Dolphin 7 / Phpbb3 Integration Saga

Hello to all - I thought I'd share my journey so far with dolphin with the group - and hopefully someone out there will have some answers to help us out.

I run an online financial website and we began a transition to dolphin 7 a few weeks ago. Now for the drama.

First - everything seemed fine - we have been able to set up the dolphin platform fairly easily - but we had been using a phpbb3 forum setup - and decided - to retain functionality - we'd attempt to integrate the existing phpbb3 with the new site/platform. Let me first say - before any of you consider it - be highly wary of any technicians on the net offering an integration. Most that seem to exist are only partial answers. In three cases with us so far - you couldn't even reliably get the technicians to support the integrations. One set of technicians operates in the phillipines - the other in western europe - another in england - for the most part - NONE of them is easily contacted - and if there are issues - you will never get a fast answer.

As it stands - we have ended up with a partial integration - the new clean phpbb3 installation.

which does us little good - new users that will register with our dolphin apparently still can't access the forums without logging in a second time. In fact - even if you do login to the forums - several parts of the integration actually direct you back to dolphin and don't work properly.

Before you decide that we didn't thoroughly plan or take time to map things out - we spent over two months - and I have been managing sites for several years. My downfall is SQL - and finding out how to run the proper query to manipulate the old phpbb3 data - transfer it into the entries in SQL for the dolphin setup - and then getting it all to work correctly. This is complicated - so be warned - don't try this unless you have alot of time to spend on troubleshooting.

Now that you know the background - if there's anyone RELIABLE - who understands how to integrate phpbb3 and dolphin CORRECTLY - give me a call. I need it done as soon as possible. Any advice or technical notes any of the more experienced readers can provide would help significantly.

Thanks,

Rick

kingofalltrades.com

There was a kind of flood of requests for phpbb 3 integration into dolphin 6.1x a while back. There were some free modifications posted, and a number of paid ones too. Some confusion and arguments if I remember right. I don't recall anyone saying one in particular worked great, nor do I recall anyone saying it didn't. These took quite a while to come about. A lot of people had been asking for them for a very long time before they came about.

Now with Dolphin 7 I wouldn't be surprised if things might need to be done differently or recoded somewhat. Since Dolphin has a built in forum made by Boonex I wouldn't expect to see anything by Boonex about integrating phpbb 3 or any other forum.

I am not a big fan of the built in Orca forum myself. It's ok, but it's limited compared to other forum scripts. VB would be my preferred forum script, but it's not the cheapest.

I don't know who you contacted to do your phpbb integration, but you might see if you can find some of the people that did the 6.1 integration. They might be working on a phpbb 3 integration for Dolphin 7.

No idea how it might affect you if phpbb went to version 4, or Dolphin went 7.0.1 or even 7.1 though. You might be right back at square one if you wanted to upgrade.

Good luck, I hope it works out for you.