Is nodebb for me?
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Hi all,
New to the forum and wanted to wade in with a question (quite possibly more than just one). I fully appreciate the choice of forum one makes for their site is totally subjective and a matter of preference and in many instances feature requirements, cost, etc.
I set out looking for a forum that did very little and that provided a robust API or hook system that allowed me to seamlessly tie in my own application into the forum.
It would appear that nodebb has it's own user management, user levels, profiles, followers, chat, etc. There are things that my application already caters for (a custom social network application) and all I'm really after is a forum that's lean and fast and that allowed me hook into it.
Is this at all possible using nodebb? Can we have tie into it from our application and pass member levels and member level based permissions directly from our own app? Have a single sign on implementation where all registrations are strictly handled by our application. Allow users to earn points within our application for creating topics and replying within topics?
I'd be extremely grateful for any feedback the community can offer and hopefully look forward to using nodebb myself.
Regards
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It'd take a fair bit of work to get it integrated nicely, as NodeBB has all of this already done on its own.
For SSO, you'd want to use OAuth2orize or something similar to create the SSO endpoint. This companion plugin allows NodeBB to work with your endpoint, so users will be able to log in via your system.
As for the rest, a separate theme that replaced links to your own user profiles might just be enough. Deeper integration such as earning points through forum posts (assuming points are handled on your end) would need a custom plugin created to work with your existing API.
e.g. User 294 posts ->
topic.posthook fired -> HTTP POST request sent to your app -> Your app gives the corresponding user account 1 gold coin -
Hi Julian,
Really appreciate the reply. So basically swapping out things like the profile links to reflect the profile on our own app and integrating into our points systems as well as getting nodebb to use our app's registration and login should be fairly straight forward. The things that would be more complicated are integration of our own user management and member levels?
I guess there is an easy way to find out ... simply install nodebb and see what we've got to work with but it's always nice to get opinions from the people who have actually used nodebb and know it's capabilities and limitations so I truly do appreciate you taking the time to respond.
I'll see what our devs make of this tomorrow because of the solutions I've seen, nodebb ticks quite a few boxes. In the meantime, if anyone else has suggestions or input, I'd be glad to take it all on board.
Regards
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Integration is always a tricky issue, since NodeBB is a full app in and of itself.
Point your devs to our read APIs. Every link you see can be prepended with
api/to see the publically accessible API.e.g. https://community.nodebb.org/api/topic/2010/is-nodebb-for-me/3
Obviously, protected pages will require an active session, but most of the pages are publically accessible anyway
