Using SA's user accounts with a forum like this

Hi,

I want to incorporate a forum in one of my sites that I'm already utilizing SA's user registration pages. I don't want them to have to have a separate forum account. Is this possible? I know you guys did it for this forum we're on - Could you help me accomplish this same task on my site? What forum software is this?

Thanks!

Although it is possible to use Security Assist with a forum software, usually most Forums have their own installation process and their own database configuration.

I would recommend looking into

www.phpbb.com/

since it is free.

Our Forums uses vbulletin.

Vbulletin isn't free? And I do realize that forums use their own user registration. I was wondering how to avoid that and use what the user is already logged in as (like you guys do). Is this a difficult process? I'm trying to avoid making the user register twice and have two diff. usernames and pwords. Can you tell me how to accomplish this?

Edit: Nevermind - I saw Vbulletin's price. I'd still like to know if it's possible to use the user registration details that the site is already utilizing, for the forum software (phpBB or Vbulletin). I know this forum is doing that - is it easy to accomplish with Vbulletin?

vbulletin is not free.

In order to accomplish this you will need to add some custom coding. Basically when a user comes to the forum and tries to register you will need to redirect them to your regular registration page (this is how we do it as well) and when you add them to your database, you will also need to add them to the forum software database with the specified information.

You can use DataAssist insert server behavior when adding the user to the forum database. or just write your own code to do that. And after a user log in, you will need to set the appropriate cookies and session to log them automatically to the forum.

Okay - so this can be done with PhpBB presumably, correct? So in my site user registration, I'll need the fields that the forum requires also in this registration, and have it update the forums database as well as the user database that SA uses. Is this difficult to do? I already have the SA user database registration page working. So I might need to add a few more fields to get it to work with the forum. That's fine, but how do I get it to update another database?

Yeah, you should be able to do it with PhpBB.

If you have DataAssist you can use the DataAssist Insert Server behavior which will insert the required information in the forum database after registering the user.

You will just need to add another database connection to your forum database.

I am trying to do the same thing and running into the following problems. When I open data assist and try to select the table phpbb_users I get a pop up message that says 'SQL type not recognized: 'unknown'.

All of my tables are in the same database as well.

Are you using a PHP Site in Dreamweaver?

Make sure to have a php site defined and a valid connect to a mysql database.

I'm curious about this too.

I would have thought data-duplication with usernames and passwords would be a hazardous situation?

There must be a better alternative. The only thing really would be to have your custom registration process add people to the PHPBB users table, and share that. the problem I found (and this is going back a bit now) was to do with PHPBB's password encryption, and getting around that. Can you configure PHPBB to not encrypt user password?

I'm not sure what you would have to do to remove the password encryption for PHPBB, but it will require some custom changes. It might be a good idea to bring this up with the support at PHPBB.

Inserting the data into two different databases, if they're on the same server, shouldn't cause much additional risk.