I was thinking why myBB doesn't add social integration such as facebook connect, google connect, twitter, open Id etc. It will be a great leap ahead!
I read about someone by the name Ali Razavi donating his codes for facebook connect to myBB community. Why not use it as a stepping stone?
The problem is the pain to maintain it. Facebook or Twitter could change it's auth in a pint of second and there we'll have all members complaining about it not working and all that. And MyBB will just need to release a quick update for something this minor.
Moreover, this all is suitable as plugin. Much of these things also sometimes leaves a vuln.
It won't be core in 1.8. MyBB 1.8.0 is pretty much feature frozen now apart from suggestions which would improve performance, the user experience, and the like. Of course anything which we desperately need but hasn't been implemented yet will also be taken in to consideration.
MyBB 2.0 will have an API which will make implementing external social features easier.
I can attest to being reliant on a third party service. With MyBB Publisher being dependent on the Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr API, things come up suddenly and then things break.
Facebook is not so bad anymore as their roadmap is pretty well defined and shared out to a 1.5 years or so. That way you can plan. Over a year ago, they would change stuff not on a roadmap or without any advanced notice or easily visible documentation about it.
I have not had any issues with Tumblr's API yet.
Twitter on the other hand, changes all the time. Just the other day I released MyBB Publisher v3.0 and that same day, Twitter changed their API requirements and broke all kinds of apps, not just mine. Those of us using a popular library for Twitter scrambled to determine the cause and push changes to the author.
I am not a big time programmer but incase of such integration in the core in the future I shall be more than happy to help either developing or maintaining. (I have some experience with facebook API, have worked integrations with wordpress and drupal).
By the way, atleast you can make use of open id or???
I just wished things like:
http://janrain.com/products/engage/engage-pricing/
Would offer more users per year. That way for social integration you never had to keep yourself busy with api's anymore and just had one tool to do everything for you. But the limit of 2500 users a year is fairly strict for some sites.
(2012-10-31, 08:50 PM)pavemen Wrote: [ -> ]I can attest to being reliant on a third party service. With MyBB Publisher being dependent on the Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr API, things come up suddenly and then things break.
Facebook is not so bad anymore as their roadmap is pretty well defined and shared out to a 1.5 years or so.
Twitter on the other hand, changes all the time.
Would not say that about facebook, it heavily depends on the API you are using. Android can be a nightmare.
But beside Twitter and Facebook there are so many integration possibilities (worked with the Amazon Product Advertising API lately, changed a lot since my last view on it) that they are better suited as plugins because the developers would have to spend a lot of time on these features.
I have not looked at the Amazon API.
The Janrain Engage would likely work for most sites as 2500 users per year is a lot, but I am not sure if it is new users or total users connecting. So far it was pretty easy to build and implement the sign-in component, but since each service returns different content, you need to custom map the return values to a common set of variable. I still need to build the registration page to take the user details from Janrain and push them into the MyBB database along with the Janrain token. Plus, with the ability to change sign-in methods through Janrain at any time, keeping track of users and their various tokens is more difficult.
For Facebook, I am using the Graph API since it is all HTTPS calls. It works well enough, but the difference in my use is that MyBB Publisher needs remote access unlike an Android app or similar that is end user initiated. Authentication is easy that way since it is directly accessed by the user and can be reauth'd directly.
MyBB Publisher needs to be initiated on behalf of someone by the end user. The limited expires token thing they moved to is a slight PITA and now requires a task file to run to exchange authentication tokens for the admin.
And I agree that these should all be a plugin, I just hope that the MyBB developers make it easier to integrate. An API keeps getting talked about, but I am worrying that it will come late or not at all and we'll be back to replicating features in plugins instead of just using them.
(2012-11-20, 03:49 PM)pavemen Wrote: [ -> ]And I agree that these should all be a plugin, I just hope that the MyBB developers make it easier to integrate. An API keeps getting talked about, but I am worrying that it will come late or not at all and we'll be back to replicating features in plugins instead of just using them.
An API will be built in to 2.0 from the start. It's probably one of the more simple features we can build using a framework so I see no reason why we wouldn't implement it.
(2012-11-20, 03:49 PM)pavemen Wrote: [ -> ]The Janrain Engage would likely work for most sites as 2500 users per year is a lot, but I am not sure if it is new users or total users connecting. So far it was pretty easy to build and implement the sign-in component, but since each service returns different content, you need to custom map the return values to a common set of variable. I still need to build the registration page to take the user details from Janrain and push them into the MyBB database along with the Janrain token. Plus, with the ability to change sign-in methods through Janrain at any time, keeping track of users and their various tokens is more difficult.
The only option i would see as a good option around this would be to let janrain handle the registration only. Meaning it creates an account that can be either logged into with the same (social media account) or can be logged in directly (through the regular system).
And simply offer a regular forum account for it. So when you sign up with a social media account. It would send a mail to the e-mail (attached to that social media) with the username (and a random password).
Should work quite well and if you sign up with other social media's you would just create a new account. I guess.. because otherwise you would have to make some sort of system that the user can attach other social media accounts to his/her profile which would make this incredibly complicated.