Yesterday I did integrated the Beast forum engine into my old application Scrive.it.

Beast is a nice piece of software, very well written. It uses Ruby on Rails, so does my application, but it is not written with integration in mind (and I think it should, because many forums need to be integrated into an already existant application as a feature).

This integration assumes that the forum and the application reside under the same web domain (that is forum.scrive.it and www.scrive.it, for me). This is important because in that way one could share the same user codebase and provide a seamless login between those applications.

So, these are the steps I did:

• I created a new database for Beast, and installed it. I’ve to assure that the mysql user that accesses Beast database can access the other application database as well (reading and writing); see below
• assure that Beast and the Application use the same session identifier. This goes in the application controller or in environment.rb of the applications

  session :session_key => '_scrive_session_id'

• Beast and my application use ActiveRecord to store session data. So, they have to share the same session table. This goes in applications’ application.rb or environment.rb as well.

  Session = CGI::Session::ActiveRecordStore::Session  
  Session.set_table_name "scrive.sessions"

• I imported all the Scrive users into Beast with a simple SQL statement “insert into users (id, …) select id, … from scrive.account”. I do not need to import passwords: user login and signup will anyway being managed by scrive.
• Scrive stores in session an object (a model) that do not exist in Beast; I then needed to create an empty model for that object and put it in the models directory of Beast
• Start fresh, removing all your sessions table records
• I created, in Beast, a controller that will route all the beast user requests (login, logout, signup) to the Scrive ones (via simple redirect_to). Then, I’ve only to slightly modify Beast’s routes.rb
• I did modified the login and logout procedure of scrive, adding the saving and wiping of some Beast keys:

# User logged in
  session[:user_id] = @account.id
  session[:topics] = session[:forums] = {}
# User logged out
  session[:user_id] = nil
  session[:forums] = session[:topics] = nil

• When a new user registers in Scrive.it I have to insert the new user in the users table of Beast. Something like that:

Account.connection.execute("insert into 
                            scrive_forum.users 
                            (id,
                             login,
                             email,
                             created_at,
                             last_login_at,
                             admin,
                             display_name,
                             updated_at,
                             website,
                             activated)
                             values
                             ('#{@account.id}',
                              '#{@account.login}',
                              '#{@account.email}',
                              now(),
                              now(),
                              0,
                              '#{@account.login}',
                              now(),
                              '#{@account.web_site}',
                              1)")

• Finally, in the config/environments/production.rb of the two applications I added

ActionController::Base.session_options[:session_domain] = 'scrive.it'

• Remember to modify one or more Beast account to be admin (and then create Forums). Update admin field to 1.

Hope this helps.