Bridging Etomite and SMF
A few months ago I started a photography forum with another moderator from a previous forum I was on. Part of our goal was to have a library of articles in a static site and link those articles back to a Simple Machines forum for discussion.
For the CMS I decided on Etomite since I’ve had quite a bit of experience setting up Eto sites and it is open source which was important since I knew I’d be hacking around making it do things it’s not supposed to do. And for the forum I settled on SMF because I had set up a previous forum using SMF and like Etomite it’s open source and that’s needed for the same reason.
I’m assuming you already have a working installation of both Etomite and SMF. If not, go ahead and install both now according to the installation instructions found of their sites.
A quick warning
Most likely the Etomite developers will be unwilling to help you much if you really screw up your installation during this hack. Ralph and Dean and any of the other Etomite group has always been very helpful, but they are always quick to mention that hacking the core code is not advised. Unfortunately, that’s what I needed to do for this.
The databases
Both Etomite and SMF need a database to store content and settings. Create a new user that can access both these databases and change the settings in Etomite and SMF to use this user instead of the one you used to set them up. Learn from my mistake, this will make it much easier later.
For this walkthrough I’m going to call the databases u_etomite and u_smf just to keep it consistent.
You’re going to need to add one table to u_etomite to track which SMF topic the Etomite articles are mapped to. Login to phpMyAdmin or whatever DBA program you use and create a table named article_forum in the u_etomite database. It needs 3 fields.
- id - integer, auto_incr, key
- topic_id - integer
- article_id - integer
Don’t worry about putting anything in the table for now.
Question, Comments...
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