Adva-cms in a "complex" existing app

[jb.feldis]

Hello guys,

I've seen a topic talking about adding adva-cms in an existing
application but it was "only" about a conflict concerning Category.

In our case the goal is to add a CMS system to our main app UpShot
(http://upshotapp.com) as we lack... hum... let's admit it...
everything on the communication side :D
What's perfect with adva is the i18n support, the forum and the wiki
(*exactly* what we need).

But we actually have a User model + authentication based on
restful_auth, a Tag model, a Comment and certainly a few others in
common. The main problem is the user+auth couple (looks like a
"better shoot yourself" trouble, doesn't it?).

So if you have any idea/clue on how to manage the transplant I would
love to hear them, glad to share the work done here and in blog
articles so that other people can do the same (ie add adva-cms to
existing complex apps).

Thank you for your help :)

[Clemens Kofler]

Hi,

you're right that it might be pretty difficult to port this existing
app to adva-cms.

You would probably need to namespace either your app or adva-cms in
order to avoid model and controller name clashes. An example for that
can be found in the adva_newsletter engine which, to my knowledge, is
fully namespaced in an AdvaNewsletter module.

In order to use your own user/authentication stuff, you would need to
install adva-cms without the adva_user engine and make sure that your
user and authentication libraries provide the same API as adva_user
does. Furthermore, we can't guarantee that the other engines are
already properly decoupled from adva_user - there might be some
tightly coupled bits of code that we haven't seen yet.

Either way, any contributions - code and/or documentation - are always
highly welcome! If you want to go ahead and help us improve adva-cms
so it integrates better with already existing applications and
modules, that would be totally awesome!

Another option for your use case would be to host the frontend site as
a separate app that only contains adva-cms (http://upshotapp.com) and
seemlessly transfer the user to your existing app as soon as the SaaS
part of your existing app becomes relevant (say, http://signup.upshotapp.com).
Apart from being easier to maintain, it would probably also yield
better performance as adva-cms is sometimes quite hard on resources
(especially memory), especially with a complete installation.

I hope this gives you a starting point. Feel free to ask more
questions and/or drop by in the IRC channel (#adva-cms on freenode) if
you need more help.

- Clemens

[Jean-Baptiste Feldis]

Hi Clemens,

thank you for your quick answer!

It's eally interesting and looks like a real pain in the ass :)

It's true that the last solution might be the best one as we can still
benefit from new versions, avoid most collisions and manage resources
in a better way.
But it looks like we'll still have to do the user/auth part as our
users should be connected to the forums with their app account (which
means we should have only one or create a bridge between both).

Well, I'm going to dig into this and I'll let you know what's going
on.

Thanks again,
Talk to you soon !

Jb

On 27 oct, 16:57, Clemens Kofler <clem...@railway.at> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> you're right that it might be pretty difficult to port this existing
> app to adva-cms.
>
> You would probably need to namespace either your app or adva-cms in
> order to avoid model and controller name clashes. An example for that
> can be found in the adva_newsletter engine which, to my knowledge, is
> fully namespaced in an AdvaNewsletter module.
>
> In order to use your own user/authentication stuff, you would need to
> install adva-cms without the adva_user engine and make sure that your
> user and authentication libraries provide the same API as adva_user
> does. Furthermore, we can't guarantee that the other engines are
> already properly decoupled from adva_user - there might be some
> tightly coupled bits of code that we haven't seen yet.
>
> Either way, any contributions - code and/or documentation - are always
> highly welcome! If you want to go ahead and help us improve adva-cms
> so it integrates better with already existing applications and
> modules, that would be totally awesome!
>
> Another option for your use case would be to host the frontend site as
> a separate app that only contains adva-cms (http://upshotapp.com) and
> seemlessly transfer the user to your existing app as soon as the SaaS

> part of your existing app becomes relevant (say,http://signup.upshotapp.com).