I think it would be nice and would benefit lots of us if we could have some forum integrations avaliable as “standard” - i.e. to turn on or off from admin.
PHPBB and VB would be the most obvious.
Simon
[quote name=‘recedo’]I think it would be nice and would benefit lots of us if we could have some forum integrations avaliable as “standard” - i.e. to turn on or off from admin.
PHPBB and VB would be the most obvious.
Simon[/QUOTE]
I second that motion, with phpbb and vBulletin
I’m not too sure now. Trying to think of the best way to run my site. I used to have forum and cart integrated as I had so many complaints that customers couldn’t log in to the forum - which turned out to be because they only had site or forum membership, if you see what I mean.
Now I am thinking of running them as seperate concerns, with their own user base, admins etc, so I can delegate the forum responsibility to another member of staff without them needing access to the cs backend to get or change customer details.
It can get difficult and compliacted using the same userbase within 2 different applications.
I think the best way to do it would be for cs to have their own forum application, probably as an optional addon at extra cost. They would then be able to do things like change forum user level depending on their shop membership and so on, which is something I wanted but it got too complicated! I would certainly buy it but it’s a long shot!
Simon
My quote is K.I.S.S.
“Keep it simple stupid”
I live by that motto, we’ve all got to cater for idiots everynow and then.
I’m not SQL guru but maybe getting the forum to link SQL tables that state email/login+password information from the CS-cart database?
This presents all hell to break loose and possibly a security issue (as always)
however I’ve seen it in action before.
and I can’t seem to find the site anymore 
Thats the basics, but then you’ve got to think;
- Can users sign up with both systems? If so how do we capture info that is not needed for one but is for the other? or will we force signup with one system? in which case we’ll need to disable everything to do with signing up for one system
- Can they edit profiles from both systems? Username, Password etc
- What about COPPA if its being used?
I know it can be done but I think its too much of a problem to integrate an existing forum to work with cs. In theory its great but in practise it gets complicated both for development, administration and upgradability!
I just wish someone would come along and code a VB style forum as a plugin just for CS, ideally free too… Now that would be great!
Interested to hear other peoples opinions, stories and ideas - my theory may be wrong and it could work great, if so I’d be interested.
Simon
[quote name=‘recedo’]Thats the basics, but then you’ve got to think;
- Can users sign up with both systems? If so how do we capture info that is not needed for one but is for the other? or will we force signup with one system? in which case we’ll need to disable everything to do with signing up for one system
- Can they edit profiles from both systems? Username, Password etc
- What about COPPA if its being used?
I know it can be done but I think its too much of a problem to integrate an existing forum to work with cs. In theory its great but in practise it gets complicated both for development, administration and upgradability!
I just wish someone would come along and code a VB style forum as a plugin just for CS, ideally free too… Now that would be great!
Interested to hear other peoples opinions, stories and ideas - my theory may be wrong and it could work great, if so I’d be interested.
Simon[/QUOTE]
you’ve got more chance of yours working.
I wasn’t expecting you to do a full blown forum as such (COPPA etc)
regardless your correct about the dev, adm, upg. I couldn’t bf doing all this for the sake of a few sales, 100 more per week then definetly lol
Well I want the community to be a big part of my site. I run a music site where unsigned artists sell their music through us. The forum is a way for the artists to communicate with the people who are buying their music and vice versa, as well as discussing other bands and so on.
Integration would be great but I think it’ll be a headache.
Maybe I’ll discuss it with the CS team at some point and see what could be done.
Just getting someone to design a skin to match my site is hard enough!
Simon
I saw your site and love the design lol, good luck getting it done again 
as forums go… SMF is pretty good… But i believe VB and many other provide API’s to allow you to bridge other pieces of software to them…
I think this is something everyone would like though… a full community site, with content managment (joomla quality) with shopping cart (CS) and Forums (pick your own fav… i’ll go for SMF)…
However, this is just not managable for updates, security, cost, etc… I can ever see this happening!
SMF actually have a beta API avaliable too, which is why I chose to begin with however I want to move to VB now anyway. I didn’t know they have an API but if so even better.
Simon
I believe instead of making a full blown forum make a simple one.
Like JesseLeeStringer said “KISS”
I think make a very simple forum, User signs up to the cs cart and a forum were the admin of the site can make cateogrys, set permission on who can see them, Who can post.
There is a site called [url]http://www.php-fusion.co.uk/[/url] who built a CMs with there own forum intergrated in.
Well, I would agree with Bossman for the majority of ecommerce sites, that may just want a simple board for a bit of communication. However, the community is a big part of my site, I have lots of users who only come to use the forum and not the shop. It is also a way for my artists to communicate to their fans. To me it is just as important as the main site, hence I need a good forum solution.
For the time being I am going to run CS and VB as seperate concerns. I have had problems in the past with customers complaining they cant login to the forum with their current usernames etc but I will see how it goes - perhaps I’ll include a short message stating that they require seperate logins.
I would love to see a bridge between CS and VB in the future though and it is something I may consider having developed in the future.
Simon
I can see the need for integration regardless of the scale. I have built a PHPBB forum for support and misc communication with our customers. It would be a great benefit for me to be able to integrate the logins between PHPBB and CS-Cart.