Zikula Community

• trawna
  
  

  • Rank: Registered User
  • Registered: Jan 25, 2009
  • Last visit: Feb 24, 2009
  • Posts: 4

  Posted: Jan 25, 2009 - 10:18 PM

  I'm developing a module that wraps a third-party application into Zikula. At the moment, I have it using Zikula authentication instead of it's default method. The next thing is to somehow integrate this application's profile information. We've handled it as two steps in the past (sign up on the site, then complete the separate profile), but this confuses many of our users.
  
  I thought about using the dynamic user data functionality, but that stores information in Zikula's tables, and substantial modifications would be required to the other app to get the information from there instead.
  
  I am picturing something similar to AuthPN, but for profile information, where modules could register themselves as being "profile providers". The Zikula profile creation, modification, deletion and reading functions would be altered to call functions in any such registered module, which would do things like add dynamic user data fields to the form, perform any required validation, save and load those fields from the third-party tables, etc. There might need to be extra permissions checking as well, or perhaps this could be handled through the standard Zikula permissions scheme.
  
  Any thoughts on this? Perhaps others have run into similar situations and already found good solutions that would be faster to implement.
  
  I'd be happy to take on the project, if people think this is of value, but I'm hesitant to make so many changes in the core and/or Profile module if it's unlikely to be picked up in a future release, as it just means more patching work for me every time a new version comes out.

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• trawna
  
  

  • Rank: Registered User
  • Registered: Jan 25, 2009
  • Last visit: Feb 24, 2009
  • Posts: 4

  Posted: Feb 23, 2009 - 11:17 AM

  Nobody has comments on this? It seems to me that the kind of "callback" structure I'm thinking of would really make it easy to write modules that cleanly wrap complex third-party software into Zikula. Maybe the new Attributes functionality of 1.2 will provide something like this? If not, and if it's going to be useful to others, I'll look at adding it.

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• trawna
  
  

  • Rank: Registered User
  • Registered: Jan 25, 2009
  • Last visit: Feb 24, 2009
  • Posts: 4

  Posted: Feb 23, 2009 - 06:35 PM

  Maybe hooks are what I'm looking for here?

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• Guite
  
  

  • Rank: Team Member
  • Registered: Jan 19, 2003
  • Last visit: Apr 06, 2010
  • Posts: 442

  Posted: Feb 24, 2009 - 02:29 AM

  Hi.
  Yes, beginning with 1.2.0 attributes are used for storing additional user data. Attributes are already used for example for adding some fields to categories (i.e. support for the topic images).
  Beside that I think the ideas mentioned at ticket #889 head in the direction you are aiming on.
  
  --
  Guite | ModuleStudio

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• slam
  
  

  • Rank: Team Member
  • Registered: May 03, 2004
  • Last visit: May 31, 2010
  • Posts: 511

  Posted: Feb 24, 2009 - 02:54 AM

  We can join forces on that, as we will offer usage of profile data from the Zafenio forum module (based on phpbb3) as an optional replacement for the Profile module after Zikula 1.2.
  Greetings,
  Chris
  
  --
  an operating system must operate
  development is life
  my repo

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• trawna
  
  

  • Rank: Registered User
  • Registered: Jan 25, 2009
  • Last visit: Feb 24, 2009
  • Posts: 4

  Posted: Feb 24, 2009 - 06:15 AM

  I'm not quite sure if those are what I'm looking for. I'm not so much looking to replace the Profile module, as extend it. We're currently using PNphpBB, and will migrate to Zafenio when it's ready, so I don't want to end up in a situation where we can use either our extended profile information OR theirs, I need both!

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