Linking forum accounts to ecommerce accounts
 

Hi, I'm currently looking into forum alternatives for a major ecommerce site and, while I personally love vBulletin, am not sure whether it is capable of meeting the needs of this particular forum, so I have the following questions and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

All our forum accounts are linked directly to a users buying/selling account on the main page with our current provider. Is it possible to do this using vBulletin, whereby, for example, banning a user on one site or changing one password, could also be used to effect the other. I know this isn't possible 'out of the box', but roughly how difficult/expensive would it be to get this done.

How difficult is it to transfer old posts done on an entirely different piece of forum software only vbulletin... lots of them (this again i understand is more of a difficulty cost issue)

My question really is about whether these two things are possible. If they are, any insight into just how difficult they are to do.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Seth

Importing posts into vBulletin should be no problem. The provide ImpEx for free with a license.

That's great to here, and you don't think it's a problem that this is going to be a transfer from an obscure forum software and not one of the major ones?

Can anyone tell me whether the account linking and integration is possible, that's by far my biggest concern and is the one make or great item

Here is a list of all supported forum software:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/impex_module_dump

Hmmm, not on there, thanks anyways. Getting our old posts aren't quite as important as the database integration

The ImpEx system is modular - meaning that you can easily create modules for importing your own custom databases.

If your software is already linking accounts to your current forum software, then i don't see why it should be a problem to create similar integration with vBulletin (providing your eCommerce software is also written in PHP.

Without knowing the actual software to work with (you did not name your eCommerce or current forum software) it is impossible to give a better answer.