Vanilla Forums - MVC Forum

General PHP
1

Came across this the other day… http://vanillaforums.org/

Version two is meant to be built using MVC principles. Wondered if anyone had looked at it?

2

I did look at it, it’s very nice although I don’t like some things (seriously… why “phpass” to hash passwords instead of a plain sha256+random salt ?). Also, I prefer the Yii framework.

A Yii-based Vanilla2-Dashboard-like application would be nice.

3

You might be interested these links about password hashing:

http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/9/7/enough-with-the-rainbow-tables-what-you-need-to-know-about-s.html

http://www.openwall.com/articles/PHP-Users-Passwords

4

Here the main point seems "hashing should be slow" so building rainbow tables will be slower. However:

  1. Using a good, long, (pseudo-)random salt can take care of this.

  2. Using a slower algorithm, you also add computational overhead to the server, especially true if the website is very popular with many simultaneous registrations/logins.

  3. Still, if you really want a slower algorithm, there are more elegant solutions like Whirlpool http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_(cryptography) which is about 2 times slower than SHA256 and atm it’s not hardware-accelerated by consumer CPUs etc.

  4. If you really like inefficiencies, you can also try things like sha256(whirlpool()) etc.

5

About the original subject, I’m currently designing a website and i wandered around for many days searching for the best* way to include a forum in a yii webapp.

Of course, as many of you guys mentioned, there are three ways to do this :

  1. Do your own forum --> I was adviced to give up for it would demand too great an effort for a certainly frustrating result (i’m no pro, and don’t have enough time).

  2. Use a yii extension --> seems the only one around is yii-forum, and this extension is on an early development stage yet, according to this community

  3. Use an off-the-shelf solution --> There are plenty popular ones out there and resources ain’t lacking**. Unfortunately Integration with homebrew webapps sounds very tricky.

Well, there are maybe good news. I believe Vanilla could actually make it***. From what i’ve read so far :

  • It has this promising jsConnect integration tool that not only synchronises users and allows cross-domain SSO, it also synchs users roles

  • It can be easily embedded as a division in your yii views

  • It comes with a documented and rich API

  • It provides interesting forum features as well as a Comments functionnality : Allows to develop your own specific page and let users comment it in a fashionable way

I’ll test and see !

By the way, Does anyone know how was this site’s forum developed ? I could also spot the same solution in a few sites mentioned in the “hall of fame”****.

  • best way in this specific personnal case is about three criterions : integration with yii, community and real customization (beyond categories, layout and display)

** to cite only one, I suggest you take a look at forummatrix

*** believe me this is no ads or interested promotion, and as I said, I haven’t implemented these features yet.

**** sorry, I can’t post urls yet. Checl the forum’s yii powered application thread.

6

When I read this I thought "who wrote this rubbish?"

Uh… it’s me 3 years ago :lol: