Re: [Lightningbug-devel] ride board / housing board

[Daniel K. G. <dkg...@fi...>]

Hi there Kevin--

On February 25, mw...@ss... said:

 > i'm trying to put together a ride board and a housing board for the  
 > Midwest Social Forum, and i really love the look of LighteningBug,  
 > but problem is that i don't have access to a MySQL server.  Do you  
 > know of a php-only based alternative? or any other solutions?

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you about this!  if you can't
get access to a MySQL server, one thing you might try doing is using
the SQLite libraries [0].  SQLite is a set of tools which lets you use
SQL-style queries and data manipulation without running a separate
server process.  There are php bindings for it [1], and adodb [2] (the
database abstraction layer used by LightningBug) appears to support
it as well.

But (you probably knew there was a "but" coming): We've never tested
LightningBug with any database backend except for MySQL.  I'd
certainly love it if LB became more portable to different RDBMS
backends, but none of the current developers have had the time to do
such a project.  We've tried for the most part to use fairly portable
SQL in the LB development, but i'm sure there is some unportable stuff
that's crept in simply because we don't test on other platforms.
There's at least one such potential minor bug documented in
library/src/class.lb.lightningbug.php (search for MySQL).

If you'd like to try to make LB work with an SQLite backend, i'd be
happy to help you debug whatever problems you run into (and i'd also
integrate any nice patches you develop into the main LB codebase).  I
can help you get set up with anonymous access to the subversion
repository where we're keeping the main codebase that's under
development.  If you're making changes to the code, you'll probably
want to work from the development head if possible.

You can send me private communications about the Midwest Social
Forum's technical requirements off-list if you like (to try to figure
out if you can use sqlite on your server, for example), but if you
decide to try to change LightningBug to work with SQLite (or any other
RDBMS backend), let's try to keep the discussion on the list here.

Regards,

	--dkg


[0] http://sqlite.org/
[1] http://us3.php.net/sqlite
[2] http://adodb.sourceforge.net/