Integrating forums with your own application and user base can be a real pain in the ass. I’ve done this in the past with Vbulletin and phpBB, but it’s really not that much fun. Both involved some degree of hacking of their core code which means problems when trying to upgrade (you have to remember every tiny thing you did to make it work). As both products improve and get more advanced you’d think they’d have built nice apis to make this job easier. Apparently not yet…

I’ve been pissing about with my own pet project ( http://www.bandresources.net ), and decided I’d like a forum too. Obviously I’d need single sign on. Was even considering building my own forum app from scratch so I would have to deal with the usual headaches, but then I discovered Phorum . OK, it’s been around since 1998, but it always seemed kind of fugly and basic compared to phpBB and VBulletin when I’d checked it out in the past. Turns out it is actually awesome - lean and fast, and it has a fricken API so that it’s really bloody easy to integrate with other apps!

Read on to find out how to integrate in a rediculously short time.