You remember me praising Miles Johnson for his Cupcake forum plugin? Well that hasn’t panned out so well.

Although the initial release that I tried for the site seemed to work fine, he shortly followed this up with two further releases, neither of which worked. I knew that he was working on an update which was to be released soon, so it didn’t bother me too much at the time and I got on with building the rest of the site, fully expecting to be able to use his plugin when the updated version was released.

That was last night, so this morning I set about installing it. Didn’t work! Still had exactly the same issues as before. I even tried installing it to a fresh copy of CakePHP (in case something in my code was causing a conflict), but this equally didn’t work. Not only that, but the process of installing it to my site then caused my login system to fail, meaning I had to revert to a backup (which luckily I decided to do just before installing the plugin).

Due to this, and the fact that I’m on a very limited deadline I’ve had to abandon the idea of using Cupcake and decided to look for alternatives. I tried to get a PHPBB3 integration working, but this also failed.

So I’ve decided to change tactic. And spent £120 in the process.

vBulletin is a very good piece of forum software that I’ve used for a number of years on other projects. At some point in the near future (although, alas, I fear not in time for my deadline) they’re releasing version 4.0. More than just a forum however, 4.0 changes the entire thing into a community. Featuring two very cool additions, a publishing CMS, and the ability for members to sign up for their own blog, it will allow for Unknown Tales to take a more (I can’t believe I’m going to say this) ‘Social Networking’ stance.

Where does this leave the original idea for Unknown Tales though? I could very well re-build the entire site to use vBulletin code (which I’ve done in the past), but that would take way too long. So instead the original Unknown Takes, and the new community site, and going to have separate, but linked, personalities.

The community site is going to be hosted on http://www.unknowntales.info/ while the interactive fiction site will remain hosted at http://www.unknowntales.net/. The really cool bit about it however is that you’ll only have to sign up once, but be able to log into both sites with the same login details. From a technical point of view, the .net site won’t have it’s own user authentication system, but rather piggyback off the .info site. This means that a lot of the boring and droll things that I need to do, such as registration, forgotten passwords, email address updates, etc.. can all be done, securely, by vBulletin, leaving the more fun stuff to me.

Now this is all great in theory, provided I can get the cross login system working. It should not be that hard to do, but it is a case of treading new grounds, so all I can do at this point is try to get it working, and see what happens.

Wish me luck!

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