Notifications

Clear all

[BRIDGE] JFiction - The Joomla 1.5 and eFiction Bridge

Guest · 2009-10-21T08:30:04Z

After much rewriting, reworking, debugging, and at times wanting to take it out back and shoot it, I am happy to announce:JFiction for Joomla 1.5 Native has been released!JFiction is now an official project at JoomlaCode. The project home page is atcan download the package directly atfront-end test server is located atyou have a site already populated, please back it up first! You should do this whenever any major change to your site is made.THE PACKAGEJFiction consists of two parts - Joomla and eFiction (duh!). The Joomla side has three (3) parts: a core component, an authentication plugin and the corresponding user plugin. You must install all three parts. Don't forget to enable the plugins! I'm embarrassed to admit I did that on my test server, and wasted a good hour hunting ghosts (d'oooooooh!).The eFiction side is actually simple. All you need to do is overwrite specific core files with the altered bridge versions, plus copy one specific file to eFiction's root. As an option, the package contains three (3) blocks that recreate or mimic Joomla's login, user and main menu modules within eFiction. Use all of them, a few, or none at all, as you wish. Just remember that these blocks act just like any other eFiction blocks, so they need to be enabled and your skin must be edited appropriately. JFiction is a "bi-directional" bridge when it comes to sharing user data. That means the user tables for BOTH systems are populated and maintained. Joomla gets user data in its required format, and so does eFiction. :-)Also, the bridge has been designed to work on pre-populated sites as well as empty ones. So, if you already have eFiction or Joomla installed with members, JFiction should work for you. Ideally, only ONE of these systems should already have members, but JFiction has been tested in my coding lab with both systems having members and did OK.Full documentation is included as a separate PDF within the package itself. As a convenience, I've uploaded it separately. It's located at the same link as the package core, again that'sread the provided documentation carefully!!!SUMMARYJFiction is a bridge between Joomla and eFiction. The bridge was developed using Joomla 1.5.14, eFiction 3.5.1 and Community Builder 1.2.1. Please note that Community Builder is NOT required, but provides some cool functionality for your members should you opt to use it. :-)The bridge basically shares critial user information common to both systems. That includes usernames, passwords, email addresses and (optionally) sessions. Because it is a full CMS and the more complex system, Joomla is the "master", meaning that it controls login/logout, registration, and other core user functions. eFiction is "slaved" to Joomla, and therefore shared user functions are disabled. Functions unique to eFiction (such as, of course, stories) are unaffected and eFiction just happily behaves as usual. The bridge is "bi-directional" in the sense that both sets of user tables are kept updated. That way, should you choose to uninstall the bridge, Joomla and eFiction should behave as they did before. The current version is released as JFiction 1.2 due to all of the reworking of the code.As you can expect, bridging these two systems has been trying, to put it mildly. :cry: First, I had to convert Joomla 1.0 code to Joomla 1.5 native. Then, I had to use code workarounds because you simply cannot readily embed one in the other. You cannot even include core files due to conflicts. For example, including eFiction's native configuration file within Joomla's front-end (i.e., the plugins) causes a conflict. Likewise, calling Joomla's front-end within eFiction caused a fatal error (which did not happen in the prior Joomla 1.0 version, btw). Joomla's password schema made things even more complex. Because of the hashing and salting, eFiction simply cannot use Joomla passwords. This presented a special challenge as, within Joomla and Community Builder, a member can literally change every part of his information. The ONLY thing (s)he cannot alter is the user id. You can see how easily things could get out of sync. To avoid this, I had to add a Joomla id tracker to the eFiction author table. It is a very minor change for bridging purposes only, and does not affect eFiction functionality at all. The bridge automatically adds the id column once you've saved the configuration, so you don't need to do it yourself.A LOT of time has been spent working all this out, but finally I think I have something that actually behaves itself.Please note that the package HAS NOT undergone extensive testing with SEF enabled. Because of the sheer number of SEF "flavors" available for Joomla, I focused instead on trying to produce clean, working code without the additional complexity. JFiction should not cause much problem, as all of the URLs used are constructed from...

Page 3 / 3 Prev

Graveyard

Last Post by Piper 15 years ago

41 Posts

11 Users

0 Reactions

14.9 K Views

RSS

Lyndsie

(@lyndsie)

Posts: 1263

Member Moderator

It looks as though you didn't add the code to languages/en.php like you were meant to. It's in the eFiction folder within the JFiction download. You're meant to copy and paste that from there into the languages/en.php of your eFic install.

The jFusion theme must not have the skinchange content variable included. This is probably because you won't want to change to other skins, because if you do the jFiction-specific blocks won't appear. But if you want to be able to change the skins anyway, you just need to edit the skin and add it.

Posted : 15/03/2010 10:29 pm

Yukino

(@yukino)

Posts: 17

Active Member

oh! i see. i just uploaded that file and not added the contents to the other one. duh. my bad. thanks!

in installed the updates from the site too and while what you said took care of some of the errors i still have these one (when not logged (guest)):

?> 
Notice: Undefined variable: my_id in /home/animeex1/public_html/fanfics/blocks/jlogin/jlogin.php on line 71

Notice: Undefined variable: my_id in /home/animeex1/public_html/fanfics/blocks/jmenu/jmenu.php on line 57

Notice: Undefined variable: menu in /home/animeex1/public_html/fanfics/jfiction.php on line 210

and if i do login i get this:

?> 
Notice: Undefined variable: menu in /home/animeex1/public_html/fanfics/jfiction.php on line 210

Notice: Undefined variable: usermenu in /home/animeex1/public_html/fanfics/jfiction.php on line 253

Posted : 15/03/2010 11:51 pm

Lyndsie

(@lyndsie)

Posts: 1263

Member Moderator

I would guess that might have something to do with the Joomla side. Double-check that the plugins are activated/configured properly? Unfortunately, I don't really know that much about jFiction. I've only just installed it. You may have better luck posting at the actual jFiction site.

Posted : 16/03/2010 3:17 am

Yukino

(@yukino)

Posts: 17

Active Member

I did try post there and haven't received any response. Is Brat still working on this? Anyone else have any suggestions on how I might get rid of the errors. They seem to be coming from the jfiction.php script sql stuff. I think. @_@

Posted : 22/03/2010 7:49 pm

Tammy

(@tammy)

Posts: 2577

Member Moderator

Turn debug off and they should go away. If that doesn't work something in Joomla is probably turning the error reporting on full. In that case to get rid of the errors, you just need to define those variables before they're used. For instance:


$my_id = 0;
$menu = "";
$usermenu = "";

I'm just guessing what they should be defined since I haven't looked at the code.

Posted : 24/03/2010 1:09 am

Yukino

(@yukino)

Posts: 17

Active Member

Thanks Tammy, that worked, all that remains is a random ?> but that's better than lines of debugging information for the time being!

Posted : 05/04/2010 12:16 am

bsky92

(@bsky92)

Posts: 10

Active Member

great news, I'd like to have it on my site, but as it is very populated, I need a lot of testing before

Is there somewhere I can see how it works? a test site - or running site - somewhere?

Posted : 25/06/2010 2:05 pm

Sakura Martinez

(@sakura-martinez)

Posts: 3

New Member

Is this still under development? Any news with regards to this bridge?

Posted : 28/06/2010 1:23 am

cleothemuse

(@cleothemuse)

Posts: 13

Active Member

I just emailed Brat to find out if he's still working on it...

Posted : 20/07/2010 7:35 am

guest6943

(@guest6943)

Posts: 0

Is there anything new to report on this?

I tried the bridge and it worked alright, but I wasn't able to log into the eFiction admin panel anymore, because jFiction redirected me directly to joomla and everything was messed up in the end.

I love how you can see the stories in the joomla user-profiles so that works just fine, but I'm not sure with everything else. But I'm not a crack at this, so it probably was all my fault anyway. 😉 But it would be too amazing to be true, if there were a simple solution to get more community into eFiction.

A bridged forum, a profile-guestbook or whatever else there might be. So I will keep on watching this thread for any possible updates because this would be the most amazing thing ever when it works properly.

Posted : 09/08/2010 3:01 pm

Piper

(@piper)

Posts: 91

Trusted Member

Is there anything new to report on this?

I tried the bridge and it worked alright, but I wasn't able to log into the eFiction admin panel anymore, because jFiction redirected me directly to joomla and everything was messed up in the end.

I love how you can see the stories in the joomla user-profiles so that works just fine, but I'm not sure with everything else. But I'm not a crack at this, so it probably was all my fault anyway. 😉 But it would be too amazing to be true, if there were a simple solution to get more community into eFiction.

A bridged forum, a profile-guestbook or whatever else there might be. So I will keep on watching this thread for any possible updates because this would be the most amazing thing ever when it works properly.

Brat is still working on this. He's using it for a live/active project of his own. I was told there is a new version that includes an almost complete code re-write to clean up a lot of functions, but I've not seen it yet. I'm currently using this for a live site, but in my (and as far as I know, only my) installation the bridge has stopped allowing people to login to the efiction side of the site. But again, I think this is something specific to my installation.

-P/KAF/PT

StoryPortal Fiction Network - StoryPortal.Net
TG Fiction dot NET | T* Fiction Archive - TGFiction.Net
LG Tales | TG Style Fiction for LG's - LGTales.Com

Posted : 30/08/2010 7:43 pm

Page 3 / 3 Prev

32 Forums
3,757 Topics
20.9 K Posts
0 Online
4,464 Members

Forum Icons: Forum contains no unread posts Forum contains unread posts

Topic Icons: Not Replied Replied Active Hot Sticky Unapproved Solved Private Closed

Become a Patron!

[BRIDGE] JFiction - The Joomla 1.5 and eFiction Bridge

Share this:

Like this: