Combining phpbb with an e-commerce application

shaneH

I am in the process of building myself an e-commerce site. I have bought a very customizable e-commerce web application that uses PHP for almost all of its coding. I decided that adding a chat forum would help to bring in and keep customers and potential customers. So I though I would just use phpbb and have the forum brought up as an include in my site.

Now I know that the forum is working because I can enter the url (http://www.mysite.com/forum/index.php) and it will come up and everything works. But when I try to bring it up with a dynamic include in the main body of my site I get these errors:

Warning: main(): stream does not support seeking in /home/paintb7/public_html/forum/index.php on line 25

Warning: main(): stream does not support seeking in /home/paintb7/public_html/forum/index.php on line 26
Hacking attempt
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: session_pagestart() in /home/paintb7/public_html/forum/index.php on line 31

Here is the code that it is refering to (first line is #23):

define('IN_PHPBB', true);
$phpbb_root_path = 'http://www.mysite.com/forum/';
include($phpbb_root_path . 'extension.inc');
include($phpbb_root_path . 'common.'.$phpEx);

//
// Start session management
//
$userdata = session_pagestart($user_ip, PAGE_INDEX);
init_userprefs($userdata);
//
// End session management
//

Now the "extension.inc" in line #25 is a file that calls up the function $phpEx which is found in line #26 and since the common.php file is not being included it is causing line #31 and all the other code in the index.php to not be parsed.

I have tried including the contents of "extension.inc" but I still get the same error message minus the line #25 error. As I keep playing with this I am begining to think that something is keeping files from being included.

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

shaneH

WOW! spent the better part of the last few days trying to get phpbb and other discussion boards to work with my site. I now know what I need to do but am uncertain of how to go about it.

Phpbb and other discussion boards are for the most part designed to run as a stand alone and not to be intergated into a site dynamically (www.mysite.com/index.php?page=forum).

My problem is that something like phpbb uses a lot of hard coded url's so if you go through and change them you can get at least partial functionallity. The problem I ran into was that if I made sure that every link was called from the forum directory by placing a forum/ in front of all the links (losts of work) sometimes the link would be read as forum/forum/link.php and it, obviously, would not be dynamically included in my sites "main content area".

What I am think I need is something that will act as a go between.

First, I am thinking that all the files in the www.mysite.com/forum directory and it's subdirectories should be put into an array.

Second, I need to have every link and image link that is called by phpbb examined against the array and using the array make sure all the files are called from the correct directory.

And Third, have each link replaced by a dynamic include (www.mysite.com/index.php?page=forum_topic) that calls the file from the correct directory and have all the image links replaced by with the correct path to that image.

One note about phpbb that I think will make this task easier is that none of the files are called directly all of the links are called like "link.$phpEx" with the $phpEx defined in a separate file that is included a the start of all the files that need it. Hence if the $phpEx = "" then I just need "link." to call the dynamic include.

I am going to try and start this but I only have a basic understanding of were to start I am hoping that you all can help with some good tips and suggestions.

P.S. hope you all don't mind if every couple of days, if needed, I bump up this post, to keep suggestions flowing. 🙂

shaneH

Ok change of plans.

I just realized that in

append_sid("index.$phpEx?blah)

the append_sid is a function that is created by phpbb in the sessions.php file and not a function that is native to php.

function append_sid($url, $non_html_amp = false)
{
	global $SID;

if ( !empty($SID) && !preg_match('#sid=#', $url) )
{
	$url .= ( ( strpos($url, '?') != false ) ?  ( ( $non_html_amp ) ? '&' : '&amp;' ) : '?' ) . $SID;
}

return $url;
}

The question then is how to modify this to make it so that all the files that are called by append_sid are dynamicaly included in my sites main content area.