3rd party system integration: forcing their URLs to wrap inside SMF

[Ramón Cutanda]

This post has two purposes:

1. To thank Arantor for posting this:

Code Select Expand

<?php
require_once('SSI.php');

template_header();
?>

page content goes here

<?php
template_footer();
?>

2. To help other users in my situation to find this information easier.

My needs

I have spent weeks looking for a good documentation / knowledge base integration for SMF. I have tried the Articles and KB SMF mods and also the articles systems in SimplePortal and Tinyportal. None of them met my needs.

I noticed the MediaWiki integration for the simplemachines.org documentation and I was looking for something similar. I don't really care about user integration, as I will be doing most of the editing myself. And I don't care much about themes either. I don't need a perfect visual match. The only things that really mattered me were:

1. I needed SMF (in my case SimplePortal) to "wrap" MediaWiki, or whichever documentation system I used.

2. Thanks to SimplePortal, I could create a page and insert an "iframe" with autoheight. But as soon as you clicked any link of the 3er party system the "wrapping" disappered. Obviously, I needed some kind of function that "forced" the 3rd party URLs to be always "wraped" within SMF.

I soon found that SSI.php "should" do what I needed. But even after reading every single topic in this page (http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Category:Integrating_SMF), I still had no idea of how to achieve what I was looking for.  I also reviewed very carefully all the examples available at http://www.simplemachines.org/community/ssi_examples.php. Still no luck.

Of course, I tried dozens of searches in the forum using dozen of keywords. But I could find nothing of use.

Finally, I decided to review, one by one, all topics post in the Portals, Bridges, and Integrations forum. And there, after reading 11 pages of posts... there it was... The SSI.php Theme load post. And in that post, I found Arantor's answer. And then all of my prayers were finally heard :-)

Placing that simple code in the head and footer of any 3er party template I have finally achieved a total integration with any system I may ever need. Of course, there is still the "template" and "user" integration.... But for me that simple code opens a whole new world.

So, retaking the purpose of this post...

1. THANKS Arantor.

2. I hope other SMF users can find this post and save themselves some valuable time.

Maybe the SSI.php documents should include a reference to the template header and footer functions so that other users in my situation can find that information easier.

All the best,

[Ramón Cutanda]

An update.

With SimplePortal I sometimes find the following code more useful:

Code Select Expand

<?php
$ssi_layers = array('html', 'body');
require_once('SSI.php');
?>

Main Content goes here.

<?php 
ssi_shutdown();
?>

Source: http://simpleportal.net/index.php?topic=1439.0

Bests,