How can I create a new user in all my single-sign-on sites when they register on any of them?

Question

I have an existing website written is Perl and have recently added a WordPress blog and BBPress forums. Each of the three systems has its own login mechanism.

To make this a little cleaner I have integrated WordPress and BBPress to enable single sign-on between the two systems which works great. I now want to take the next step and integrate things further so that when some registers with our site our Perl scripts create a new WordPress user, a new BBPress user (if necessary) and logs the user into all three systems.

Also, when a users returns to the site, I'd like to log them back into all three systems. I'd appreciate any advice on how to best accomplish this.

Answer 1

Why not use LDAP or similar to unify the login, rather than create lots of accounts?

Answer 2

Depends on where perl stores it's data, if that user data it stores is file-based, then just read those files, and integrate perl users with wordpress users.

Answer 3

Reverse engineering may be the answer, if you're feeling spunky. Set up an empty WordPress database and dump the SQL emitted by the app while going through the user registration flow. Rinse, repeat for any other WordPress flows that you'd like to emulate in your Perl app.

Answer 4

OpenID implementation, perhaps? If you want some sort of federated login standard that's not LDAP. There's probably a plugin for that if there's one for LDAP.