Rhodes wrote:Well what I want is briefly the following: I have a site and a forum. I now want to include my forum into that side so that it looks like if the forum was displayed there in an iframe, but without using iframes. Therefore I wanted to hook into $template->display($handle, $include_once = true); so that my site header, footer and sidemenu is displayed as if it was done by $themplate->display().
For this, you could adjust the overall_header and footer within the phpBB template...
Dealing with changes to templates and so on I want to care for later, for now it would be nice if I only get an "hello" displayed above the forum header. With that I could at least imagine how to get the html for the divs from my site to bring it into phpBB's templatesystem.
The hook(s) is/are meant for executing external code from within the hooked function, not "using" the functions per se. Hooking the template->display() method is usually needed if you need to "bend" assigned variables or add/change assigned loops (for example someone could add a new "hand-made" forum using hooks). If you just want to "use" the template engine you need to use the template engine within your site.
Anyway... to hook template->display you would only need to embed phpBB into your site (with the code i posted above), register your hook (as explained within the doc) and then do the code magic from within your function which get called once template->display() is executed. But your approach is completely wrong for what you want to achive.
Authentication I want too, but I saw that there is an auth api what I planned to dig into later after I solved the displaying of the forum into my site.
No, the auth api is different (naming conflict for this doc, may be confusing). You need to have a look at includes/auth/*
So if one assumes my site is an application then yes I want to include phpBB into my application.
Never assume something.

But if you want to see your site as an application, with it's own template engine, it's own authentication, permissions, session handling, etc. - then yes, it may be an application. But still, the goal need to fit too.
First of all, i would try to solve your "blank page" problem. With the code above (putting it into test.php within your sites folder and having phpBB within the phpbb folder one beneath [Adjust the path if needed] and executing yoursite/test.php should display the board index as if you called phpbb directly). This also leads to one essential problem in application integration. You usually always have to entry points - the board and the application. Therefore, it is suggested to put some files on "do not access mode".

Some did this by making the apparent phpBB files inaccessible and routing pages through one of their site pages, for example:
Code: Select all
mysitecode/
board/
board_installation_hidden/
within board you would have the "router", within the site your site and within board_installation_hidden the sole boards code (without the need to ever really touch it).
As you can see by the above, it is not as easy as it sounds.

And therefore not a shame if this is not crystal clear to you.