Existing site user integration

[stubbers]

Naderman, will there be documentation for developers interested in building such a plugin? I'd certainly be interested in doing a few!

Cheers,
Stubbers

[naderman]

Well it's planned, but not written yet

[stubbers]

Cheers, I look forward to reading it!

[MouseAT]

Good to hear. I know this functionality will be essential for a lot of users.

[stubbers]

Only problem is making them all play nice together! Even if you create a plugin that starts a new session for say coppermine whenever someone logs in, well that's all good but how do you keep the passwords and users synchronised between 2 and maybe (in my case) 3 applications. I'm yet to nut this one out!!!

Any ideas more than welcome,

Cheers,
Stubbers

[Eelke]

I personally think that the best way, both to keep synchronization problems to a minimum and for a better user experience, is to choose one "master" application, that you allow to handle all your registrations, profile management, etc., and sync the other user tables from there. Personally, I plan to look into Joomla + Community Builder, I think it has some hooks to plug custom code into upon user creation, modification, etc.

[profpete]

LDAP might be of use here

[tannie]

Authenticating user sessions for different software with just one database is pretty difficult for n00bs like me. I hope once the RC is released we will get such synchronising scripts. It takes a lot of time and patience to build such auth scripts. You have to learn the script layout of all the softwares you want to synchronise with each other.

[stubbers]

Synchronising is not a good way to go... If you are talking about having 3 user databases that sync to eachother every time details change on one... You can end up with inconsitancies! Imagine the amount of time you would spend fixing that!!

I agree on choosing a master app... Now I just have to figure out how!

Stubbers is now 18 (and passed the drivers licence test this morning)

[Eelke]

Just don't forget you can only take this master-app thing so far. For example, say you choose Joomla+Community Builder as your master app. You could probably change links in phpBB to point to a user's CB profile, maybe you can also persuade it to use the Joomla login screen instead of its own. But what about information such as homepage and IM info that is displayed with each post. You have two options:

• Mod phpbb so that it extracts this info from the CB user database instead
• Sync the information from the CB master database to the phpBB database

I personally really meant the latter option. What I meant by master-app is not necesarrily no syncing, but keeping the syncing in one direction only, e.g. in the above example, users can only update their profiles through Joomla/CB, and not through the regular phpBB screens.