Hi Nodebb users,

I am happy to finally make this post. Some of the regulars may have seen me on other threads discussing forum design.

We recently launched Flockport which provides ready to use instances of popular apps based on LXC containers. And we have a Nodebb instance ready for download and use. See the Nodebb container in action here

Containers are like lightweight virtual machines, that let your run multiple Linux OS containers within your host OS. So you could be running a Debian host with for instance multiple Centos, Fedora, Ubuntu containers and vice versa. And the biggie is these containers are portable across any Linux system. So you can move your Nodebb installation across servers with minimum fuss, just zip it and move!

Even better containers operate at near bare-metal speeds, there is no virtualization overhead. This is fantastic technology for end users and the only reason its not seen more widespread adoption and use is due to lack of marketing by the Ubuntu supported LXC project.

Linux containers (LXC) is supported natively in the Linux kernel. Most distributions have LXC packages available and its mostly an apt-get install away.

To use the Flockport Nodebb container you need to install LXC and download the Nodebb container -150MB. This frees you from installing and configuring web stacks and apps, just download a container and you are read to go.

We have tons of guides and videos to help users along. There are currently over 40 apps that users can download and launch in seconds from real toughies like Discourse, Redmine, Gitlab to the easier ones like like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla.

As many of you will notice when you visit the website we are using Nodebb for our community section - a big thank you to the Nodebb team for giving users a fast, lightweight and modern forum! We have opted for a clean minimalist look. I would love your feedback, thoughts and inputs.

HI folks, so I have been evaluating a number of forums for a new website, and its taken longer than expected. I started with FluxBB and other more traditional boards, and ended up going through through Vanilla, Nodebb, Discourse and Esotalk - which i really like for its simplicity. I sort of like minimalism.

Vanilla has SSO out of the box with Wordpress which is a plus, and with some general theming it can look decent. Discourse too has a surprisingly simple to set up inbuilt SSO, which is a plus but then its one thing to get Discourse installed and another to actually run a day to day website. Discourse appears robust and is undoubtedly well thought out and engineered but unless you are a developer or intimate with Ruby, it can be intimidating. It also requires 1GB ram minimum, and that's real and scaling it will no doubt take resources.

Nodebb is fast, snappy and modern and has a base engine which I feel the theme and design don't do justice to yet. It has a lot of nifty features and transitions. I have nearly settled on it, struggling a bit with the sso plugin currently.

Like I mentioned I sort of like minimalism and was trying to tweak the CSS - color used sparingly, for highlights with the focus on conversation. I have 2 results I wanted to share with the community for feedback and inputs.

What I have struggled with is the first page - I think this needs rethinking, at the moment either it can be minimal with no purpose just requiring another click to get to the conversation, or be really busy. I have also struggled a bit with tags, and the conversation boxes. In a minimal design colorful tags if not done right can draw attention away from everything else rather than highlight the topics as is their purpose. Also the conversation boxes with too much shadow do draw away and can look busy. This is not intense, work in progress, just using the custom css. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Dark

Light

Ok, I haven't made much progress, this is a bit more complex than expected. I had naively presumed the 2 Oauth plugins on both sides would be friends and play nice.

But not to be. You need to debug the Wordpress Oauth2 Provider plugin to understand what data it is passing and how, and then the NodeBB SSO plugin needs to be customised to parse this data properly.

For anyone who is familiar with the NodeBB SSO plugin this is how the Wordpress Oauth plugin works.

Once you install the plugin the Oauth2 gateway becomes available at - example.com/oauth

To add a consumer you simply enter a name and redirect URL and the plugin gives you the client id and client secret codes.

You make a authorization request ( request URI needs to have state=anything_you_want, client_id=client id, response-type=code&redirect_uri=http://nodebb.org #using this just to debug

Example Domain

(example.com)

This is what you get back from the gateway

http://mynodebb.org/?state=2020&code=d5543c2b60338de3bd0e3663ccb42e1e0dd6b028

code= is the authorization code. You need to use this code to make a token request like this

Example Domain

(example.com)

This is what you get back from the gateway - the access and refresh token - yeh!

{"access_token":"e9ca0772593294bcc4d3d506e6dfdc5a87f73525","expires_in":3600,"token_type":"bearer","scope":"","refresh_token":"e70c3cbafa5941ae05ec5a9b40014b5948c72561"}

You now need to use the access_token to get the user data like this

Example Domain

(example.com)

And this is what you get back - viola!

{"ID":"3","user_login":"vanilla","user_nicename":"vanilla","user_email":"[email protected]","user_url":"","user_registered":"2014-07-05 16:18:31","user_status":"0","display_name":"vanilla"}

Now to make this work for real the NodeBB Oauth SSO plugin needs to be modified to follow the above flow to get the user data and register the user for SSO. I looked at the twitter, facebook, and Google plugins for reference but its far from simple without real coding skills. Help!

@psychobunny - thanks! I personally think containers are just too useful across a range of use cases and its only a matter of time it becomes mainstream. And our job is to make it as easy for users as possible.

Nodebb is lightweight and superfast - the only biggie pending is SSO, and I sort of have it on my list of to do list for a couple of month and should get to it.

@a_5mith - thanks for sharing that, I am going to get that updated.

@a_5mith - just updated the nodebb logo on the Flockport containers page. Let me know if it looks ok, thanks!

I was looking at the facebook, github, twitter and Google SSO files and comparing them to the standard oauth plugin. Each of them has a slightly different way to get user profile data.

The other thing I noticed is there may be some lack of standardization with Oauth2. For instance the Wordpress oauth2 plugin requires a 3 step process; authorize url, request token url, and request access url.

In the Nodebb plugin the Oauth2 pluggin only has entries for a authorize and request access url, so its missing the request token url which is probably a reason its failing. Or the Oauth 2 Wordpress plugin is not coded properly.

The Nodebb Oauth1 does have an entry for request token, I tried that and it doesn't work and results in an 404 error. At least with the Oauth2 you do get redirected to the Wordpress login, but fails when redirected back to Nodebb.

One more thing I discovered on this SSO side trip, is Discourse has SSO working out of the box, and its super simple to set up with any php based website, there is a specific Wordpress plugin - a one page php file, and it works. Given how tough a lot of things are with Discourse for those not familiar with Ruby this was a genuine pleasant surprise for me.

Ok guys, here is my first stab at trying to get the Wordpress plugin working and I am failing miserably so far. I keep getting a 404 at Nodebb whatever I do. Frustrating.

@Julian thanks for the passport link, I was vaguely aware of it and since I am currently trying to understand SSO and have been reading the OAuth 2.0 draft it was helpful to go through all the strategies.

WIth my slighter better understanding the Google SSO plugin seems to be the closest fit to the Wordpress Oauth2 plug in.

Here is a screenshot of the token endpoint

And of the access user profile endpoint

And here is my first attempt at a custom strategy. The data is provided in json by the wordpress plugin. Only including the changed bits from the Google Oauth2 strategy. Please note the Wordpress Oauth 2 plugin does not work without the 'state=' parameter.

function Strategy(options, verify) {
options = options || {};
options.authorizationURL = options.authorizationURL || 'http://example.com/oauth/authorize?state=2020';
options.tokenURL = options.tokenURL || 'http://example.com/oauth/request_token';

OAuth2Strategy.call(this, options, verify);
this.name = 'wordpress';
}

Strategy.prototype.userProfile = function(accessToken, done) {
this._oauth2.get('http://example.com/oauth/request_access', accessToken, function (err, body, res) {
if (err) { return done(new InternalOAuthError('failed to fetch user profile', err)); }

try {
  var json = JSON.parse(body);
  
  var profile = { provider: 'wordpress' };
  profile.id = json.ID;
  profile.displayName = json.user_nicename;
  profile.name = json.user_login;
  profile.emails = [{ value: json.user_email }];
  
  profile._raw = body;
  profile._json = json;
  
  done(null, profile);
} catch(e) {
  done(e);