Integrating 3rd-party forum software to member-based website

Question

When using some existing forum software in a larger web-site, how easy is it to:

1)Make your site's login functionality log the user into the forum

2)Make your site's registration functionality create forum login data

I suppose in a way it might be easier to ONLY use the forum's database for maintaining users, but that means trusting it with sensitive data.

I'm planning an integration between an existing bespoke desktop app and a new bespoke web-site which should include forums. I don't know which forums will be used but I know the new web functionality won't be PHP-based. I figure that's not a big deal but I'm wondering if forums typically allow configuration of where they look for login data, to avoid duplicating this data into my DB and the forum DB.

Answer 1

It's usually pretty easy, but it completely depends on the Forum software that you choose.

I've written systems in both PHP and ASP.Net (C#) that integrate with phpBB or vBulletin databases.

The login functionality is the easiest part to implement because the hash is stored in the DB (usually a salt will be too), and you just need to check one field to another and voila you can authenticate!

The registration of users is a little more difficult.

The way I did it was browsing through their source code to find out what SQL commands were necessary during the registration step.

So, depending on the forum software you choose, the difficulty will change, but overall it's not to difficult to make happen.

I would offer you snippets on how to integrate with PHPBB and VB, but since those are both PHP based, you said you weren't going to use them.

Answer 2

You are actually looking for a Single Sign On feature, that is integrated in several forum softwares, like Simple Machines and JForum for example.