Adding An Aef Forum To Snews Cms

Adding an AEF Forum to sNews CMS

Although not truly integrated, here is an explanation of the steps I took to have an AEF Forum Software present itself as an 'integrated' page on the sNews CMS.

1. Download a standard sNews version 1.6 Content Management System. Instructions are found on the sNews site. (refer to link list below) There are several flavours of sNews. This method has only been tested on the sNews 1.6, but should work on other versions as well.

2. Created a MySQL Database and user, Modded the snews.php, and took the usual steps for installing as a package. Note that the sNews is installed into the {root}/snews directory of the Hosting account.

3. Install an AEF Forum into a subdirectory of the sNews install named "forum", so the forum is installed into {root}/snews/forum of the Hosting account.( http://www/jlhaslip.com/aef_103_demo / )

4. Ported and Modded a Template from http://www.andreasviklund.com/ which had 2 column, 1024 pixel layout. The layout is a sidebar left version with the "content" on the right hand side. This is where the Forum will display.(optional, this method will work on a standard sNews layout, if the width is flexible or wide enough)

5. Added a Menu system as per http://cssplay.co.uk for a Horizontal Centred Unordered List. IE Conditional Comments required for the menu system need to be added to the Template.(optional)

6. Added the Categories into the sNews CMS which I wanted to be shown on the sidebar of the page which contains the Forum.

7. Added a "Welcome" and Forum link at the top of the sidebar in the Template index.php to have the Forum link display on all pages.(from source)



8. Performed a "View Source", Ctl-A select all, Ctl-C copy and pasted the page into my Text Editor. Then added the following code to have the forum displayed into an iframe. I know they aren't pretty, but it works. Indexing or SEO is not a requirement on this particular site, or I might have re-considered the use of an I-frame. This process is not complete. I will be investigating other methods and will report any success I might have.

>>> change URL to suit your actual Account/Domain information <<<
??? could also be relatively referenced to the base href (not tested)???

9. Save the page as "forum.html" as per the link added into the top of the sidebar into the same directory as the sNews CMS. (see #7 above) The Forum can be Browsed to directly using this as the endpoint of the url.(see reference below)

10. Note the html code for the iframe is sized for width to fit into the available space of the page. If you use a different Template, both the width and height may need to be adjusted. I set a height to the iframe due to browser differences. Auto or 100% failed in various Browsers, and a fixed height seems to work in all of them (to my satisfaction at least).

11. As a note, I should mention that AEF is a really nice piece of work. I have stats comparing AEf to a phpbb2.0.22 and the AEF Forum uses one third of the bandwidth. Although fairly new, the package is very functional with a News rotator script, a fixed or pop-up shoutbox included, and many more nice features. I encourage you to check it out. Also, Language Packs and IE png support is forthcoming. The version demo'd on this "integration" is utf-8 and IE png ready. The Language system is being developed as I write this Tutorial and will be available very soon. Translations are available for Spanish immediately and several other languages to follow quickly. (Egyptian anyone?)

So, that is how I did it. Not a true "integration", since the Logins aren't tied together, but they do fit into a single database. By default, the AEF database is prefixed with "aef_", so unless your Hosting requires one, no prefix would be required for the sNews Tables.

Please Note: The copyright on the AEF Forum is mandatory, and the Forum will shutdown if you remove or modify it. Just a warning. It does, however, include an optional second copyright line. The method for adding the copyright and "Ad Bars" are on the AEF Demo site, for your reference.

I hope this helps and please post any questions you need answered. I will do my best to reply as quickly as possible.

And thanks to all the "Dudes" for getting the sNews package to this point.


References:

Demo of a combined sNews and AEF Forum: http://www.jlhaslip.com/snews/
AEF Forum as a standalone Forum : http://www.jlhaslip.com/snews/forum.html
Tutorial on installing an AEF Forum: http://www.jlhaslip.com/aef_103_demo/
Link to AEF Support Forum: http://www.anelectron.com/board/
Download sNews 1.6 here: http://www.snewscms.com/

I'd suggest jlhaslip not to use sNews, because it is more simple and more vulnerable to attacks. I nearly had about 3 different installations of sNews all updated and with the security patches but they were hacked by a group and on further search I found out that almost all the sNews sites have been hacked by the same group.

I checked out their forums but they had no solution for it.

I believe that vulnerability has been patched with sNews 1.6.

sNews 1.7 will be available {around} April of 2008 with even more Security and Optimizations.