the gods would have to realign the planets.

You want to rewrite both b2evo and phpBB to work with MsSQL, good luck.

youre never stuck with anything. there are thousands of hosts.

even workplace solutions exist. One little nix box never hurt anyone.

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Incidentally, I moved this. Its not a support question, sorry.

Fortunately phpBB already works with MS-SQL. Unfortunately MS-SQL is it. My workplace does not and will not allow MySQL without a dragged out and very painful process that will take far far too long. Long and painful enough to consider spending the time to rewrite B2Evo to work with MS-SQL then unifying the user admin pages for seemless user login and account management.

You have a long path to follow to get a reasonably normal database, and no idea how to make b2evolution work with the thing you have available, so why not follow the path that exists?

I've not heard of anyone ever doing what you want to do. Doing it would therefore make you the world's expert on it.

Integrating b2evolution with another app is doable, and has been done a couple of times lately. I haven't played with it or followed the threads about it because it's not something I need, but you'll want to check out the LDAP plugin and make it do whatever it is it does to suit your needs.

Oh and to get going on making it be friendly with MSSQL start with blogs/install/index.php and see what in there looks wrong for the other type of database. By slowly forcing the installer to install on the other type of database you'll get to a point where you can begin to see how b2evolution interacts with the database, and therefore tweak it as required.

Good luck!

jspegal,

As Ed mentioned, there are some plugins that help to integrate the user systems of b2evolution with other apps. I would take a look at the [url=http://manual.b2evolution.net/Plugins/gallery2_plugin]Gallery2 plugin[/url].

Bummer about being stuck with mssql. Good luck with the conversion. We'll help as much as we can. There may be others that want to use it, too. I remember one other guy who was in a similar situation. I think EdB told him to quit and find another job :P

It is hard for me to imagine that a business wouldn't want to use open source at every opportunity. Oh well, good luck.

For the 2.0, it will be easier, but not easy.

B2evolution is a lot dependent of MySQL Database. It uses a small abstraction do the db things, but a lot of querye designed for MySQL are everywhere.

You want to port the b2evolution to MS-SQL. My desire is to port to PostgreSQL. So, in 2.0, I have changed a lot of queries to be in the standart dialect (not the MySQL dialect). These queries work with MySQL AND PostgreSQL, BUT there's a lot of things MySQL specific in a lot of places (like the REPLACE syntax), and make b2evo work with another databases.

The installer is too almost MySQL-centric.

It's possible, it's 5% easier with 2.0, but it complicated.

[]'s
- Walter

just a note to personman: my employer does not allow open source code because, believe it or not, there is no one to say "fix it or we'll nail you to a cross in court" to. When you pay for software you have a contract and a reasonable set of expectations. When you use what you can you get what you get.

EdB wrote:

just a note to personman: my employer does not allow open source code because, believe it or not, there is no one to say "fix it or we'll nail you to a cross in court" to. When you pay for software you have a contract and a reasonable set of expectations. When you use what you can you get what you get.

Open source software does not imply there would be no one behind the software to sue after! ;-) AFAIK, Automatt, the main company behind WordPress, offers a specific professional support for some customers.

That makes sense, Ed. I guess that's why we're starting to see more business growing up around selling paid support and consulting for open source software.

kwa it most certainly does! Read the disclaimers on open source software. Typically it goes like this: "This software is as-is and no warranty as to applicability or functionality is stated or implied".

In the case of b2evolution here is exactly how it states that:

b2evolution is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

See http://b2evolution.net/about/license.html for yourself if you want to.

When an open source app "grows up" and sells support that's a different ball game. My employer MIGHT one day want to buy a blog app. If they did they MIGHT go with WP, but only if WP ran on microsloth crapware because we're locked in to MS so tight it's disgusting.

Anyway they won't because we all can have blogs at work and I've no idea who wrote the code behind it. It's a crappy blog app, but it's the one my employer chose for whatever reasons they found valid. Heck it might even be an in-house application. Anyway it sucks and I don't use it because you either speak the happy speak or you get in trouble with the man. Something like 80K employees and we get a crappy blog app and NO rss reader available. derrrrrrr........ Whatever: they pay me so I love them long time. Until I get a job elsewhere :D

Back on track: sorry, but open source software is not something any professional organization should consider as worthy. Changes that happen on upgrading can make their application useless. No one to look to and say "excuse me but you accepted payment and your product failed". Also the provider can simply disappear. If b2 didn't stop happening there wouldn't be a WP or a b2evolution to even think about, but it stopped so here we are. What will happen with all the b2evolution installations if Francois gets a job that tells him "stop doing open source work, and by the way we're paying you an incredible amount so take it or leave it"?

So yeah: open source is great. Players get to highlight their skills and everyone gets to enjoy a free product, but it simply isn't suitable to the corporate world. The corporate world that expects to pay for products and services, and expects a measure of applicability and support for that which they've purchased.

EdB, I'm sure all that's true with your company, but my company uses open source quite a bit with no problems so far. Maybe it doesn't always save money because we're the ones saddled with installing and updating the the software and when something breaks, we're the ones spending our time solving the problem, rather than calling support.

Also the provider can simply disappear.

A closed source company can also disappear. The difference is, if a closed source vendor disappears, their code disappears with them. If an open source project dies, then you're free to take the code and continue to use and improve it. Seems much more sustainable to me. And if the project goes in a direction you don't like, your company can create a fork. Not every company has the skills in house to do that, but that's where a support contract comes in.

By the way, b2evolution can have that, too. Francois and AstonishMe can both be hired to give paid support and development, I think. But most of the time it's not neccessary.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but it's a very interesting topic.