WTForum

Ruby library that wraps Website Toolbox's Forum API.

Useful for folks looking to embed the forum into their site, while maintaining a user-facing appearance of a single user account.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'wtforum'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install wtforum

Features

WTForum has the following features:

CRUD user accounts

# Modeled after ActiveRecord API

# Create
user = WTForum::User.create username: "wtforum_test_user", email: "[email protected]"

# Read
WTForum::User.count
user = WTForum::User.find(user.id)
user = WTForum::User.find_by_username(user.username)

# Update
user.update_attributes! username: "wtforum_test_user_2", email: "[email protected]"

# Destroy
WTForum::User.destroy(user.id)
user.destroy

Log in your user via their Single Sign On (SSO) API

session = WTForum::Session.create(user.id)
session.token # => REiB6U5SkxB

Configuration

Before using WTForum, you need to give it administrator credentials. It needs four pieces of information:

  1. Where the forum is hosted.
  2. The API key that Website Toolbox provides.
  3. Username of an admin account.
  4. Password for said admin account.

Example Rails config:

# config/initializers/wtforum_credentials.rb
WTForum.domain = "forum.example.com"
WTForum.api_key = "TEgPYR4Zapz"
WTForum.admin_username = "__admin_api_dont_delete__"
WTForum.admin_password = "s0m3p4ssw0rd"

Why do we need to specify an admin user account in the credentials?

Unfortunately, Website Toolbox's Forum API is missing some functionality. Specifically, you can only create a new forum user account. Need to read, update, or delete an existing user via the API? You're out of luck! As a workaround, this library uses an admin account and Mechanize to sign into the website and manually fill out forms and screenscrape the results. I hope that the API's breadth of functionality improves in the future.

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create new Pull Request