http://www.shertonenglish.com/social/ finally launched ;)

Hi guys. This is our new Elgg implementation, we add it to our existing site using phpBB authentication for the whole site functionality.

Default language is Spanish but you can change to English by clicking the US flag.

Some concept about our implementation. We already had 200K registered users thus, changing the authentication platform was not an option.

We extend the phpbb session to Elgg pages, people always registers an log into phpBB. When a user go to an Elgg page, if he/she already has an Elgg user, the system log him/her in. If the user doesn't have it, a new Elgg user is created in background and logged in. As phpBB and Elgg have different rules for usernames, we finally opted for a hash as a Elgg username, but it is transparent for the user.

We synchronized the language manager between both system and we used the phpBB role manager into Elgg. The phpBB message queue is used for notifications (thanks to Cash, I took some ideas from his php_mailer :)

About the UI, we rewrite almost all views using semantic XHTML in order to match the existing site, and also rewrite some plugins like blogs and private messages.

We added a complete breadcrumb and we unified the plugins menus criteria.

My thanks to those who solve my many issues from the beginning of this project. I will appreciate your comments.

Thanks
morgar

Site home: http://www.shertonenglish.com/

Home page

PhpBB forum: http://www.shertonenglish.com/forum/

image

The new Elgg social network: http://www.shertonenglish.com/social/

image

The groups page:

image

The profile page:

image

The album page:

image

 

  • Very clean and sharp website!

  • @ morgar - Very Nice

    Very nice morgar, cool design and nice layout, but i couldn't understand any thing :D, i know only english.

  • Hi Invisible. Default language is Spanish but you can change to English by clicking the US flag in the orange bar.

  •  

     

    Nice integration People!

    Not a mete tag expert but if You load these meta’s does not Your browser go to the right language? I know they help the search engine spiders.

    If You view source at Your phpBB http://www.shertonenglish.com/forum/ You will see they added these tags. 

     

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="es" xml:lang="es">


    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="es" />

     

    By the way I think it is very dangers putting www.w3.org address on every web page on the internet I like to use.

     
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN">

     

    <html xmlns=dir="ltr" lang="es" xml:lang="es">

     

    I realize people think I’m paranoid maybe am I’m......ran



  • Hi Randy. I'm not sure if my english is enough for understanding your point.

    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="es" xml:lang="es">

    The lang code is put there by the php script. If you change to english those codes are changed to en_gb. If you say we can detect the language of the browser user and change it automatically, yes, we can, but it is not allways the right decision. We have thousand of US latin users that have their browsers in English, but they don't speak it and they are trying to learn it.

    About the link to w3.org, I have no idea why that could be dangerous, please explain.

    Thanks

  • Good point regarding Your members.

    To put one single web address like www.w3.org on every web site. A router script could easily be written to route all web traffic thru one place. You would know who is asking for the web page and where it is coming from. You would have the power to control what people see on that web page. You could remove buttons or change the content to any thing You want. This is just really a bad idea in general. They say it is so Your browser does not go into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode i have not seen it make any difference with or without the doc type. I realize You do not get the good feeling green light of approval from the w3 when You validate. Anyway from a security angle it is just not a good idea just my opinion.

    Again Great Job on Your Site!.........ran