Sphene Community Tools

I'm taking a look at Sphene and I'm trying to see how suitable it would be for the "criteria" my boss has given me for a forum. I'm wondering how/if the following would work for us?

- User Management: Need to be able to do single login via our own current LDAP
Are there any "hooks" for something like this? If so, where/how? I see some callbacks, but we have our own scripts that already do LDAP auth and I'd like to feed sphene with these credentials before the user gets to participate in the forum.

Email Integration: -- Daily Digest Checkbox, etc. -- RSS Feeds
I see the "Notify me by email" here on this forum but is there any RSS support? If not, would that be easy to integrate programatically?

Thanks!

hi,
you can use LDAP authentication. but this is not really part of SCT, because it simply makes use of djangos authentication mechanism. So you might want to checkout the django documentation on authentication backends or some examples of active directory authentication on djangosnippets.org.

If this doesn't solve your problem let me know.. it's usually quite easy to implement external authentication.


RSS: currently there are only RSS feeds for single forum categories - e.g. http://sct.sphene.net/board/feeds/latest/5/ for the news. It would be easy to also create an RSS feed for the whole forum.

Email: when you check to receive email notifications for new posts you will receive those immediately for all new posts. there is no functionality yet to have a daily digest. i imagine that it shouldn't be too hard to implement such a feature though.

Thanks Herbert. I should have clarified that we already have some python ldap scripts that do this. So we'd merely need to somehow hook into your user auth system so as to keep it single login. I didn't write these scripts (I'm at a new job and my boss basically just told me we have python scripts that do ldap authentication). I think he may have said something about storing user "stuff" in the session but I'm not sure. I have never built a django application so I'm pretty in the dark about how it does user auth stuff. I definitely need to take a day or two and build a "toy djano app" so I can see how this works (so forgive me if my questions are very newbie!)

I basically wanted to know if there was an easy way to inject or override sct for user credentials. Am I correct in perceiving from your last answer that if I can somehow inject the django session with this, sct will automatically pick it up (and not require the user to login again)? Thus achieving single sign? Thanks again.

i am a little confused :) do you have python functions which handle your authentication, or do you already have an existing django web application which implements authentication?

SCT completely relies on django authentication - and uses the django user object for login & co. so... if you already have a django application handling authentication you are basically all set.. just add SCT to the application and the login works as before.
if you only have a couple of functions handling the authentication you need to write an authentication handler for django and use your functions there.. it still should be quite easy to do it ..

hope that clears things up :) - SCT does not have it's own authentication system or anything, it makes use of the one django already offers.

> python functions
Yeah, I think it's just pure python functions that do this now (I still have to check). But your response is quite helpful thanks - we'll just need to somehow tie our ldap scripts to set the user stuff in django (on our end) and integration should work. Thanks again.

Do you have a comparison matrix between sphene, djangobb, and other popular django based forums? I've seen http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/ForumAppsComparison but I'm not sure that it's so up to date.

i think it's pretty up to date.. although 'comments' are actually a 'yes' now. (see comments documentation) - and i guess message history .. if it is meant that you see the latest post of a user.. is now also supported (just click on your or mine profile and you'll see).

i have no other comparison matrix, since i'm not that familiar with those other forums. if you have any specific requirement/question i can answer that, but since i don't know all the features from the other forums it's hard to tell. :)

I noticed that you have several revisions available on the Downloads link. I know we should really update to 1.1, but for an "inter-rum solution" which would be the latest that works with django-0.96.1?

oh.. that could be a problem.. you should definitively use at least django 1.0
you could try SCT 0.3 or SCT 0.4 and enable backward compatibility in the settings.py:

SPH_SETTINGS = {
    'django096compatibility': True,
}

maybe you are lucky.. but unfortunately i can't remember.. let me know if you really try it out..

I will convince the team it's time to bring the legacy stuff up to date.
BTW, just installed act on my mac and it's quite nice (I have the latest
stuff on there) My boss is going to take a look this afternoon so I hope
he likes it too! Thanks for all the help