Hi,
I operate a PHP-based website in which there are several disjointed parts: a vBulletin forum, a help desk ticket system, a knowledge base, a large sales database (with license keys), and a gallery. In the future I plan on integrating all of these into a single customer backend, where they can for instance view their license key, submit a support ticket, post to the forum, purchase new software, upload their images to their own gallery... all under one web interface. Currently each of these components are operating in a separate database and a completely separate interface - they all require separate logins. I understand this may be quite a bit of work, but I just wanted to see how you would do it.
I'm not an experienced object-oriented PHP programmer - I only have practical scripting experience in PHP. My first thought is to create a new database specifically for this integrated backend. Where a segment (forum, shopping cart, etc) would regularly just write to its own database, I would also write to this new database, which would only contain the information relevant to the integrated backend. Then when I'm designing the customer interface, i just make use of the information in this database. How does that sound?
I'd love to hear any input you might have. Thanks a bunch.