mambo, SMF & aMember Pro

I have searched through the forums and am unable to find the answer to this.

Does aMember Pro work with the forum SMF by Simple Machines in a Mambo site? And if it will, how exactly is that accomplished? Is there a plugin existing for aMember Pro/SMF somewhere? I have read that there is a plugin for Mambo/SMF. Is that all I would need?

Is the integration "easily accomplished?" Can someone instruct me on how to tackle this? Thanks.

(For the sake of discussion I will refer to Mambo 4.5.2+ & Joomla 1.0+ together as "Joomla".)

There is a Joomla Component called "SMF Bridge" which allows you to connect Joomla & SMF together in much the same way that aMember connects together various pieces of software through its "Plugin" system. However, you cannot connect a piece of software in the middle (in this case Joomla) with 2 different bridges and have a robust system, that is, you can't connect SMF to Joomla with the SMF Bridge Component & Joomla to Amember with the Amember "Joomla" plugin and have it work.

The reason is that each "end" of the bridge isn't aware that the other bridge is part of the system. If you were to connect all 3 and then made a change in SMF, then aMember would not be made aware of it. On the other hand if you made a change in Amember, then SMF would not be aware of it because Amember & SMF don't have a direct relationship with each other.

To get these 3 to play nicely together, you have to drive your system from a single point of focus (which in this case should be Amember), meaning you would need to write an Amember Plugin for SMF and use it together with the Amember Mambo (soon to be Joomla) Plugin.

Hope that helps and I explained it understandably,

John

thank you

Thank you. I think I understand now. Do you know if an AMember Plugin for SMF already exists anywhere?

Would you recommend Simpleboard as an alternative option that would work with AMember and Joomla?

No there isn't an Amember Plugin for SMF. Simpleboard works seamlessly with Amember and Mambo/Joomla as it is a native component of Mambo/Joomla and doesn't need "bridging". Do some research on the www.joomla.org forums and at www.tsmf.net regarding how people like that component..its pretty good and has all the basic features covered and it perfectly integrated....so all together not a bad solution.

-John

will do

Thanks for your help. I will go over there now to check it out.

forum

I wanted to reinvigorate this post because I have similar questions. I plan to use aMember to protect my entire Joomla site. In that site, I plan to use a forum that is fully integrated with Joomla (I assume there are more than one?) If I go that route, would my forum also be "protected"? I use the term "protected", because my site is an academic website, and I plan to use aMember to password protect the site rather than to have members pay a subscription. So, the discussions and forums are part of the academic Joomla site, and I would like to keep them "protected" as well.

Thank you. Once I figure out Joomla a little better, I plan to buy aMember and the Joomla plug-in. Hopefully by next week?