phpbb and Drupal profile integration

I once did about exactly this on this site: http://myrockinspace.com/cms/
One thing is most important advice: If you can by any means avoid using phpbb, do it. Not PHPBB in itself, but in combination with Drupal. The integration works, but basically it is a hack. Drupal forums offer about everything you need and the integration is seamless.

If the forum is there, you maybe don't have a choice. If the client has some money, you could talk him into migrating the content.

If there is no way: do the profile with content profile only. That's what we did. The integration module redirects all clicking on username in PHPBB to the drupal profile page. Panels 2 or 3 offers everything you need in combination with advanced profile. Integrating both profiles may be possible with enormous effort, but just seems silly. (no offense meant). It was a mess :(

Lots of features are redundant, and a user profile should be a seamless experience. If a client comes to me ever with a plea to integrate PHPBB maybe I refuse. Needless to say the client from the site I linked decided in the end not to launch at all because the integration was too bad :)

What might work is to use PHPBB for Forum only and keep all other stuff to Drupal.

But good luck :)

Life is a process

Alex. what you say is true (especially performancewise). I should make some additions:
PHPBB integration may be fine as long as you use it only as a forum.

Problems arise when you use PHPBB features like Privatemsg or whatever and overlap with Drupal begins.
It is also dependent on the size of your site: on your small local community it just does not matter. But if it is to be a social networking platform, things are completely different.

I just hate Third Party integration :)
But yes, looking into "Real" Forum Software one has to admit it is optimized far better for its specific task than Drupal Forums are.

A thing that might bring peace to this troubled landscape is the new push for installation profiles - A "forum" distribution might rock our boat, with Advanced Forum, lots of helper modules and a basic profile (well, advanced Profile I guess) set up with sensible default and nice theming.... Become famous, start working on the Profile :)

Kudos to Boris Mann for his present push in this area. Patterns and other "Meta-Module" Modules might get us to a different point here...

Life is a process

Well no, there are integration modules for PHPBB. To be honest, I had to integrate PHPBB 2 and to use a no longer supported Drupal module. So I had to get on the nerves of the former Developer who was very friendly but could not help me with a problem that had to do with magic_quotes_gpc (a server setting) that prevented the cookie being correctly set which again prevented the single-sign-on. I describe my despair and solution in another post in this group.

If the PHPBB is in Version 3 I believe things are much better. The Drupal integration module is much more powerful and provides more database queries and blocks beyond only one "latest forum posts". What you can always do is write queries handishly - this is by far less complicated than one thinks.

A module we actually wrote was one to make Profiles private by choice of the user - only viewable for friends, for no one, for logged-in users which was not complicated.

All the profile stuff is done by panels in combination with advanced profile.

What really got me in the engine room of mysql was the importing of 5000 users (and deleting 2/3rds of them again because they were not active anymore). But it all worked in the end, even having PHPbb use Drupals User pictures as avatars is not really a problem (I wrote a tiny module for that).

Another mini-module (actually just a few lines in template.php) uses the image of content profile as the regular $picture on drupal, so the user only uploads one image which is used everywhere.

All this will probably be much improved in Drupal 7 because fields went to core and profile module which is hated by every Drupal developer because of its lack of flexibility will be able to use fields, maybe we will not need content profile anymore or it can be merged with profile module or whatever.

If you need any concrete advice, contact me. This would give some sense to the work I performed on myrockinspace, which has not been launched to date - I don't know If I am sad or glad, because there would still have been an enormous amount of bugfixing. Creating a real community site is quite a challenge I found, but after that wou will have grown a real man :D

Life is a process