I have decided to make a new post since all the old posts are around 3 months or older.

I have a fresh install of Joomla! 1.5 with phpBB 3.0.3 as my forums, BB controls all my users and I would like to setup Roster within the forums. I was reading over a lot of the posts but don't feel I understand how it works properly. So if anyone knows how to do it I would like to know how I go about getting RosterSetup with BB.

I read in TankGirl's post that the way she has it setup is no one can join the forums unless they use their guild name and anyone is turned away who doesn't. Well we plan to also use our new site for recruiting purposes so that is not feasible for us. Is it possible to get this thing setup where, after the roster is installed you claim your characters?

When building our website I found several cool technologies that I wanted to use. The trick was getting them to work together. For starters, I wanted a single sign-on environment (SSO) that would allow users to log in once and see forums, messages, raid sign-ups, etc... So after several months, here is what I came up with:

CMS: Joomla
Forums: phpBB3
Raid Mgmt: WoW Raid Manager
Guild Member Mgmt: WoW Roster
WoW Templates: WoW Installer

So I build the site using Joomla. Keeping in mind that non-technical guild members will need to update content I found Joomla to have a clean warm look and feel to it while maintaining a decent list of WoW related modules. From there, I installed phpBB3. PhpBB3 is very flexible and I use it as the main authentication for the site. It also allows me to create custom user fields that I will get to later. The next piece is raid mgmt. while Blizzard made some decent changes to the in game calendar it just wasn't enough. For this I went with WoW Raid Manager (phpraider/Spiffy Jr.). Now my next trick was to keep a single location and a list of guild members. For this, I use WoW Roster. And last to give it that warm wow look and feel I grab the templates from wowinstaller.com.

So within Joomla I installed a module called jfusion. Jfusion allows me to set joomla to use phpBB3 as the authentication for the web site. And since WoW raid mgr also allows me to use phpBB3 auth, I now have a level playing field for SSO. Leaving nothing to chance. I ask my members to type their character names when the register on the site. After that, its all automation. I match what they typed to the wow roster DB Tables and then display those matches as available toons when registering for a raid. I also use signgen to create the avatar pics and I "used" to heavily use the armory sync but that once great wow roster add on has fallen from its pedestal. To get all of this to work did require a few php/html changes along with a few mysql changes. I will try to document them but that is not one of my strong points. . But in genneral, I tinkered with:

Changed one of the tables to a few so that it leverages the phpbb3 user id's and wow rosters toon data. I also tweaked the html/php to remove the ability for one to create a manual toon. (so in a nut shell, an officer has to sync the guild to wow roster before a new guild member will be able to register for a raid). I also made an instert script that used to "trick" wowroster with the armory sync to make toons clickable so that I could then sync them with the armory. (I miss armory sync....). This script also sets the avatar to the pic that was created by siggen.

Feel free to check us out at www.shadowsyndicate.org I am also available on the Exodar realm by the name of Thunderspud. I hope my ranting here helps others as many of the forum posts that I have found helped me.

Thunder,

Your site looks great and has a lot of the features I am trying to get going in my site, would you be willing to perhaps assist me in getting roster setup within my site?

I assume you have a lot of your site setup in a wrapper, I noticed your wowroster was, but was not sure if your forums were or not.

yup. my forums pbpbb3 are in a wrapper as well. jfusion made it very easy to leverage the wrapper function within Joomla. Ill be happy to help with what I can. just drop me an email.

thunderspud@shadowsyndicate.org