[xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki

[Thomas Krämer]

hey shiva,

i finished exactly the scenario you depicted yesterday:

the many advantages of xwiki (as blog and wiki engine) combined with an
advanced forum, that takes into account the discoursive nature of
knowledge development in enterprises as well as in non profit contexts.


in brief, there are two major issues: authentication and authorisation.

fortunately the xwiki developpers have done a good job in providing a
configurable mechanism to switch the authentication class
(see xwiki.cfg or the respective section in the admin guide)

You implement the XWikiAuthService and probably the XWikiAuthenticator
interfaces and at the next login, credentials are verified you defined
in these classes. i do an (layered) access to an existing application
(the forum part of your scenario; it's not necessarily the better user
management, it simply was there first).

a little trickier is the second issue, authorisation.

i decided to let the quite mature user / group / right management
systems of both apps as untouched as possible, but enable one of them to
rule over the other.

sergiu uttered the idea of a REST approach, which i turned into some
kind of remote control for the xwiki user management.

so, whenever my forum admin want to have a new group, a new group is
created in both systems, a space with the id [groupname] is created
where only grup member have edit rights etc.


i attached an outline of that class.

that is, however, not the only way to do what you want, and possibly not
even the most appropriate.





Yours

Thomas


shivshan schrieb:
> Hi
> I have been thinking of integrating XWiki into a portal for sometime. The
> ideal scenario would be to have a wiki, forum and blog all integrated within
> the Portal, which is the company's knowledgebase.
> Am debating whether to use SSO for different standalone apps like XWiki,
> JForum etc or take a plunge into Exo/JBoss.
> Any inputs/experiences would be greatly appreciated.
> Thanks
> Shiva
> 
> 
> Antonio Goncalves wrote:
>> Thanks for the information. I think that like Paul I'm going first to
>> install and use JForum (and give up phpBB), and then set it up so SSO is
>> used between both applications.
>>
>> Antonio
>>
>>
>> 2007/4/19, THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) <bt0008 at att.com>:
>>>  Antonio:
>>>
>>> This response is probably not much use, but it might be, and besides I
>>> enjoy showing off my brilliance...
>>>
>>> Because JForum is a J2EE implementation of phpbb, moving to it will
>>> probably be less difficult for users (and maybe administrators as well). 
>>> We
>>> have installed JForum (and Roller for blogging) on the same appserver
>>> with
>>> our XWiki instance.  The integration of the three was limited to placing
>>> links to them in XWiki's viewheader menu.  This has (I think) one small
>>> advantage over phpbb since, as J2EE servlets, all could share the
>>> appserver
>>> and its session, so that logging in to one is logging in to all.
>>>
>>> However, all three used separate user databases and hence separate
>>> registration despite being on the same host and being skinned to look
>>> mostly
>>> like a single application. This resulted in a lot of user confusion,
>>> because it was not clear that they needed to register individually on
>>> each
>>> of the three applications - I received numerous calls from users who
>>> didn't
>>> understand this.
>>>
>>> If you use XWiki's LDAP plugin (and your forum tool has an equivalent
>>> option) or a similar mechanism to what we are now doing - which is a
>>> servlet
>>> filter that digests cookies set by our SSO server and automatically
>>> registers users in each one - this will all go much more smoothly, of
>>> course.
>>>
>>> The filter is simple to deploy but, with very little standardization in
>>> J2EE security practices (none that I know of in the user lifecycle space)
>>> it
>>> can be challenging to adapt to each servlet's specific registration
>>> needs.
>>> In my case, the generic filter was finished in about three days (counting
>>> the time it took to learn the relevant Servlet API parts) but the adapter
>>> class that applied it to XWiki took more than two weeks.  This was just a
>>> little above the average: one JSP developer took my jarfile one morning
>>> (while the filter was still in development), informed me of a bug around
>>> noon, waited for me to fix the bug and deliver the new jarfile, and had
>>> it
>>> working with his app before he left for the day; the guy working with
>>> Roller
>>> took about three weeks (though, to be fair, he was also fighting the
>>> vagaries of a new release of Roller with a very different configuration
>>> of
>>> the ACEGI security package).  JForum took about the same as XWiki, mostly
>>> because of having to interact with other servlet filters in its
>>> deployment.
>>>
>>> brain[sic]
>>>
>>>
>>>  ------------------------------
>>> *From:* Antonio Goncalves [mailto:antonio.mailing at gmail.com]
>>> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 17, 2007 2:37 PM
>>> *To:* xwiki-users at objectweb.org
>>> *Subject:* [xwiki-users] Which forum to use with XWiki
>>>
>>>
>>>  Hi,
>>>
>>> With my XWiki I need a forum so people can exchange information on
>>> various
>>> topics. I'm installed phpbb but I was wondering if there was any "better"
>>> integration between another product (JForum or JavaBB). Has anybody
>>> installed such product ? Any feedback ?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Antonio
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>>
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
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-- 
ontopica

Thomas Krämer

Krämer&Okpue GbR

Kurfürstenstr. 66
53115 Bonn

Fon 	+49 228 - 180 99 737
Fax	+49 228 - 242 78 60
Email 	tk at ontopica.de
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