I've been exploring options for our tandem club website www.evergreentandemclub.org Currently we're using a free perlscript (wwwboard) for our message board and another free perlscript for our calendar. We'd like to add a user customizable and searchable member profile to the mix. And to further complicate matters the message board and profiles need to be in a password protected area along with some other stuff but the calendar is in the free area. I'm wondering if there's any way to make vbulletine meet ALL my needs?!

Right now we're on a Unix system and it's been easy to password protect a "realm" (all pages/folders within a directory). But we have to assign each password manually (their birthday) and then have to respond to lost passwords and we don't allow them to change their password. I don't want folks to have to enter in a password for the whole member area and then have to enter another one to use vbulletin. Any ideas how to make this work?

As we're approach the end of our first year of membership we're thinking IF we can figure a way to do all this differently, we'd like to change our host. All our memberships expire the end of March. So on April 1 we'd like to be setup somewhere (cheaper?) where those who've paid their renewal could be approved with their own password. I'd like to find a way that a member could create their own password, upon approval by admin knowing they'd paid, and could change their own password and could get emailed if they forgot their password. While we only have 300 members the way we do it now it's pretty labor intensive.

So I'm interested in any input you have to offer. I guess one of my main questions specific to vbulletin is if there's a hack that would allow me to customize the fileds for the member profile and make that data searchable by the members. We'd need roughly 10 fields.

Thanks.

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Sheila Hoffman
Newsletters & More
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You can create as many member profile fields as you would like. The best part is that you can set each to be viewable or even editable by the user. Lots of good uses for those.

You would need to do a little hacking I think to have those fields become 'searchable' ... check the forum around here as someone may have released a hack to do that.

If its just forums you need 'protected' ... VB has something called access masks. Meaning that you can set an individual to a usergroup and you can assign privledges for that usergroup.

If you dont have the privledge set, you cant see - let alone access - specific forums.

Thanks for your reply. I knew I'd need a hack for searching the database. That's what I need to know i... if someone would do that for me because I wouldn't begin to know how.

Also re: the password protection... I have a members only area of my site. Within it are the message board, the searchable member profiles, and some other assorted html pages (ability to rent a bike case, place a classified ad, list a ride to lead, etc). I need the entire directory called members to be password protected once with the vbulletin piece within that area. Does that make sense?

thanks,
Sheila

Sheila,

How many profile fields are involved? And do you want all of them to be 'searchable'?

I haven't designed it yet but probably about 10 fields +/- and yes, all must be searchable.

thanks

Alright, consider it done.

Cool...Thanks!

I'm assuming that there'll be a way for me to approve each person before they can setup their password account because we only want paid up members to be able to have access to the board.

And I'm also assuming (hoping) that the calendar can be such that no one is allowed to enter stuff on it except admin. Is that true?

I'm thinking I might be able to just use vbulletin, with your hack and not have the rest of the html pages be in a password protected area. I don't want folks to have to enter passwords more than once. Does that make sense?

thanks again.
Sheila in Seattle

Sheila, everything you asked in your post is correct.
I will send you by e-mail the hack to search profile fields, so you can be sure. :)