chat-room, forum, gallery, wiki integration

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Aidan Brown
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chat-room, forum, gallery, wiki integration

Post by Aidan Brown »

Hi All

I've told some people that i am going to work on integrating the chat-room, forum and gallery so that every user does not have to re-register for all of the mentioned and activate all of them ...

so this is going to be a tread of my notes and plans for what i hope to achieve.

user registration -
data gathered from the user and added to a initial database after passing validation checks. upon which an e-mail will be sent the the user with an activation key ( much like the forum does at the moment) this will change a value in the database from 0 to 1 making the user account active.

after activation -
the user is then given the option of which web applications they would like to use in the form of a series of tick boxes. once the users selects the ones they wish to use they click submit and the relevant databases for those applications are updated with their username, password etc.
once you have added your details to an application the option will not be there to remove them as this can lead to 'orphaned' posts/images for example or if the user adds the application again multiple id's for the same user.

change password -
asks for the original if OK attempts to change the password in the databases of the applications that the user has installed. if the database update fails there will be a error set in the database which will warn the user that an applications password could not be updated, this will automatically send myself an e-mail with the error details (this will not contain any password information).

database access scripts -
for each of the applications i will create a script which will update it's specific database, this will allow them to be called separately( actually i may call them as functions I'm not decided on that yet). this will allow other applications to be added later on if any are needed (not sure what else could be added but makes it easy if there is).

all the users on the forum will have there details added to the initial database automatically.

gallery specific -
for the gallery users are created using an api which doesn't like md5 password hashing very much so i will create the user with a set password then find the user in the users table using their username as the unique identifier and change the password for that record to the correctly md5'd password.

forum -
users md5 password can be easily added automatically

wiki -
haven't looked into this yet believe it to use md5 hashing as well.

chat-room -
uses md5 hashing, already linked to the forum, this would change from being the slave of the forum to being the slave of my user area (like all the others).

all the password changing etc would be done through my users admin area not through any of the individual applications themselves, i hope to make all of these sort of links point to the users admin page.

phew glad that lot of writing is over! :D

if that makes any sense to anyone I'd be very glad to hear some feedback :D any possible additions i hadn't thought about
kentgardener

Post by kentgardener »

it's early in the morning but sound good to me. :D

_____________________________________________

John
Mark

Post by Mark »

Clear as mud to me :? but then again I struggle with all this Teccy stuff :?
User avatar
Aidan Brown
Site Admin
Posts: 531
Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:04 pm
Location: Gravesend, Kent, UK
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Re: chat-room, forum, gallery, wiki integration

Post by Aidan Brown »

just an update, i haven't forgotten about this just i've had a lot to do and not much time to work on this. i have drafted out how it is going to work just need to start working on the coding at some point.

also at this time i am going through re-doing th styles of images on most of the pages in the normal site and adjusting the layout, a lot less wasted space :D and i am working on styling so that the margins are each a fixed width of say about 50px and the page streatches to fill the rest of the space :D.
User avatar
Aidan Brown
Site Admin
Posts: 531
Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:04 pm
Location: Gravesend, Kent, UK
Contact:

Re: chat-room, forum, gallery, wiki integration

Post by Aidan Brown »

Update: i have written the scripts to update all of the relavant applications and the create a new user bit, i am currently writing the edit your details part. then after that i need to do some testing, add some style to it and then modify the applications to point their registration bits to it :D.

as an advanced warning the gallery will be changing in the near future to plogger. if you have a look at it its supposed to only support one user (like admin) but i did a few minor changes and it now supports multiple users :D. the reason for the change is the exsessive load time on the current one, it takes on average 8 seconds to load a page whereas the new one take ~1.5seconds so quite an improvement.

Aidan
Gaz

Re: chat-room, forum, gallery, wiki integration

Post by Gaz »

As always thanks for the efforts to make things more user friendly!!!
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