Auth_xphpBB

Well, it's been a while since I've blogged on here, due to getting snowed under with coding, but I've now got something you might find useful.

If you run a user interactive site, you might well use phpbb as your bulletin board software, and MediaWiki for your user generated documentation. (Well, at least I've run a site or two doing this).

There's already a nice extension here that allows MediaWiki to use phpBB login credentials, so you don't have to keep shuffling two sets of users around, but I thought it would be nice to go one further and use the actual phpBB API. This is the result.

This extension requires PHP5.2, MediaWiki 1.11+ and phpBB3. To get this working, you'll need to do the following:

1. Because MediaWiki and PHPBB both make prominent use of a class called 'user', and because PHP 5.2 doesn't provide a nice way of using include or require and yanking the whole lot into a separate namespace, you'll have to modify one codebase or the other to avoid conflicing class names. I recommend changing phpBB, and renaming user to phpbbuser. You will need to change the class definition and constructor in includes/session.php and the single instantiation point in common.php.
2. Download the source here, unpack it and put it in the extensions subdirectory where you've installed MediaWiki.
3. Add the following code to the bottom of LocalSettings.php:

   
   require_once './extensions/Auth_xphpBB.php';
   
   $wgAuth_Config = array();
   // Name of your PHPBB group
   // users need to be a member
   // of to use the wiki. (i.e. wiki)
   // This can also be set to an array 
   // of group names to use more then 
   // one. (ie. 
   // $wgAuth_Config['WikiGroupName'][] = 'Wiki';
   // $wgAuth_Config['WikiGroupName'][] = 'Wiki2';
   // or
   // $wgAuth_Config['WikiGroupName'] = array('Wiki', 'Wiki2');
   // )
   $wgAuth_Config['WikiGroupName'] = 'Wiki';
    
   // This tells the Plugin to require
   // a user to be a member of the above
   // phpBB group. (ie. wiki) Setting
   // this to false will let any phpBB
   // user edit the wiki.
   
   $wgAuth_Config['UseWikiGroup'] = true;
   // Path from this file to your phpBB install.
   $wgAuth_Config['PathToPHPBB']    = '../phpbb3/';
    
   // Localize the messages
   $wgAuth_Config['LoginMessage']   =
   'You need a phpBB account to login.';
   $wgAuth_Config['NoWikiError']    =
   'You are not a member of the required phpBB group.';
    
   $wgAuth = new Auth_phpBB($wgAuth_Config);
   

   These settings should be familiar if you've used the Auth_phpBB.php extension, though you'll notice there are a lot less options.

   Any thoughts, comments, praise to the skies or flamewars, do let me know!