Integrate Membership Control with PHPBB

Monday, 02 November 2009 22:20 Last Updated on Monday, 01 March 2010 23:01 Written by Administrator

1. I would like allow only my members to access my PHPBB forum. How can I achieve that?

Integrating PHPBB Forum and Membership Control

What you need to achieve this:
1. Membership Control version 4.0 - GBP 59.00
2. PHPBB - Membership Control Addon - Free

Membership Control verssion 4.0 can be downloaded from here: Download
PHPBB Addon for Membership Control version 4.0 can be downloaded from here: Download

Step 1: PHPBB and JFusion Installation

The first step is to install PHPBB. Please install it in a subfolder called "forum" under the Joomla installation folder. For example, if you install your Joomla under the folder "home/yourfolder/public_html/", your PHPBB should be installed under the folder "home/yourfolder/public_html/forum/". If you have install the PHPBB in other folder, please change the folder name to "forum" and make sure that this folder is under the ROOT folder of your Joomla site which you are going to install the Membership Control component to.
Go to JFusion's website to download the JFusion plugin: Download
Follow these steps to install JFusion and setup the PHPBB setting:
- After downloading the JFusion component and installing the component, access Joomla Backend --> Components --> JFusion. At this stage you will see that your PHPBB plugin has not been published.Please click the Joomla Options Icon to Edit Joomla settings.

Details of how to configure Joomla Options can be found from here: JFusion Docs

After saving the Joomla Options Setting, you will see the following page. Please change joomla_int plugin as the Master user plugin, then click the Wizard button on the PHPBB row to start a wizard to configure PHPBB.

Then enter the forum address to the form field:

The wizard can help you identify all variables that have been set in the PHPBB configuration. More details of how to configure PHPBB settings can be found from here: JFusion PHPBB.

Make sure that you select the default User group for new users in the PHPBB setting:

After you finish configuring PHPBB, back to the Configuration page, and change the phpbb3 plugin to be a slave plugin.

Now go to JoomlaBackend --> Plugin Managers, turn on the JFusion Authentication and JFusion User plugin, and turn off the Joomla Authentication and Joomla User plugin.

And

That's it for the installation of JFusion and PHPBB

Step 2: Install the PHPBB Forum Addon

Please install the Membership Control component by following this instruction.
Next, please install the PHPBB Addon by going to Joomla Backend --> Components --> Open Source MSC --> Addon Management --> Browse --> browse the "MSC_Addon/phpbb.zip" in your PHPBB Addon Zip package.
You will then see the following screen when you install it successfully

Once installed successfully, please go to Components --> Open Source MSC --> Click the title of the membership group:

You will see the PHPBB tab available for you to configure it:

NOTE: The first time you use the PHPBB Addon, the PHPBB Group will NOT show up because it has not copied the configuration file from PHPBB to your Joomla website. Now, please click the Save button to activate the PHPBB addon.
After that, you will see all PHPBB groups are showing up in the drop down list, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now please select the PHPBB group that you would like to link with the Joomla membership, and click the Save button.OR you can click the "Create The Member Group in PHPBB?" option to create this group in PHPBB.

Let's go to test if the bridge works or not

Go to your Joomla Backend --> Components --> Open Source MSC --> Please click the member quick link to manage your members information

Let's select all users to add them to the membership, and see what happens in PHPBB.

Now go to PHPBB Backend --> General --> Manage Groups --> Click the Members Link for the group you were testing. You will see that the three members are added to this group.

Now go to Permissions --> Forum Permissions --> Select the forum you would like to configure the permissons.
Select the group and click the Add permissions. Also, you can remove those groups that do not have permissions to access this forum.

Then edit the permissions at your own perferences.
That's it. The forum will be accessible OR only accessible by members in this group.

VirtueMart offers the ability to assign users to a Shopper Group. This enables Storekeepers to create Shopper Groups for whatever need (e.g. site access, customer rating, tax display, etc.). These shopper groups can then be used to provide special services, discounts, or access to a specific group of users. Because users and shopper groups are associated to a particular vendor, it is important to create your vendor records before creating the user and shopper group records.

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