Hey everyone, I apologize for the lack of updates of the last few weeks. I recently started a new job as an Engineer in a local data center and have been getting my ass kicked with work. I am hoping that things will settle down soon so I can get back to developing the forum contributions that I have been working on. The forum itself is functional on my site with very basic functionality including creating posts and editing them. It has been awhile since I have done any work on the site that it is active on. Let me answer the most recent questions:
Question from cyric118:
Possibly Stupid Question: Would it be easier to simply bridge an existing forum option like MyBB or phpbb with OpenCart?
Answer
I highly doubt this due to the fact that OpenCart uses an MVC framework and none of the existing forums do, at least not that I am aware of. Not that the framework would stop you from integrating it, but it would definitely make it a bit difficult. You are potentially talking about writing an entire bridge to "integrate" the sessions between the two pieces of software and this can be very difficult to do. Personally, writing a native forum into OpenCart is the best solution because it conforms to the MVC framework and will be relatively easy to install.
Question from cmebd:
Styling: Will the forum integrate with the css file or will it come with its own?
Assumption: Forum will integrate with OC install based on "customer" being able to use their customer/login details that will automatically give them access to the forum???
Answer
As you can see right now, my OpenCart installation is not using the default template. My store is a very heavily modified template that I custom designed and integrated writing all of the XHTML and CSS by hand. Once I feel that I have enough features in an initial test/beta release, I will install the latest copy of OpenCart and integrate the core code into the fresh install. I will then go through and modify the forum template files to match the default template. This will make it easier for those who have not changed their templates to actually install the forum contribution. For anyone else, you will definitely have some tweaking to do but if you are able to modify the default template, you should not have any problems installing, modifying and configuring my forum contribution. As for having a separate CSS file: I could definitely make this happen and I probably will just because it would be much easier if someone has modified their default template.
If anyone has any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know. I have begun work on the admin part of the forum contribution. Once I get that up to speed with the front-end itself, then I will begin adding more features. Hopefully within the next two months or sooner we will have an initial test/beta release.
Thank you again for everyone who is interested. The more people that we get interested, the faster I will get the development done so I can get this released.
Cheers!