Integration in existing community site

[kangoosin]

Hi,
I have an existing community site where members have created accounts with username/password and a profile.
I would like to integrate now a forum to that site.
The integration should be seamless to the members and I cannot change the existing architecture.
Therefore I have the following question concerning VB:
1. If a user has already registered and logged in the website, is he able to access the forum without having to register again? He shall be able to post or moderate if he was given additional rights.
2. If a guest visitor is browsing the site and goes to the forum section, is he able to read the posts without being able to write? At the same time, he should be invited to register but not in the forum but the site itself.
3. When some is writing a post, his profile info is shown in the left side (username, avatar, ...). Can those be taken from their existing profile on the community server (username, age, profile picture, ...)?

I had to drop already few forum solutions due to the impossibility to integrate those properly. So I hope VB will be the right one finally.

Thanks for your help,
Julien

[Eagle Creek]

Depends what kind of registration you know have. vBulletin developed IMPEX, especially to inport data from excisting boards.

[kangoosin]

Thing is I don't want to import the data, I want to keep them in my community member DB. I want VB to check against that DB instead of its own DB.

[sebbe]

I'm not 2000% sure but I think that's not possible. vB needs to check permissions, settings and all that stuff. All such info comes from the DB.

[kangoosin]

I see, so what about the following.

When a member register on the site, I create one account in the site and one account in VB.
I replace VB login and registering with the site ones.
When a member login the site, I create a session cookie for the site and for VB.
I remove the possibility to use profiles from VB and link to the site profiles instead.

So is that a better option and possible?

Thanks

[sebbe]

At the top of my head, that sounds possible to me.

[eosgreg]

i think what they meant was...
what site DB r u with? i e impex can import from phpbb etc, name the sort and i thin kimpex can probably do it ;)

[kangoosin]

This is a propriatory solution, with a MySQL DB.
I will check IMPEX but this is only about importing existing one. A bridge will have to be created.
Do you know if there is some info somewhere related to session cookie/authentication for VB?

Thanks