Automatic registration / login
 

I would like to add vbulletin to a site with an existing registration / membership system. When a new members register to the site, I would like the username and password to be automatically added to the vbulletin system so that they do not have to register to the forum as well. Whenever they login to the site's members section, I would like them to also be logged in to the forum.

Is something like that possible? Can anyone help?

this would be exactly what i need! can anyone help?

it would help if ya gave more information like whats the existing member system like post nuke phpnuke mambo or another portal system

I am intensely interested in this area as well, and so far the best I've seen is for Joomla/Mambo-to-vBulletin. It's called vBridge and you can read about it here. The single-database version is already released, and they are very close to releasing a multi-database version.

As I'm not 100% sold on the Joomla/Mambo platform just yet (still a wee bit shy on features I need) I would be VERY interested to hear if anyone else has come across a strong alternative that offers the following features at a minimum (ideally tied to vBulletin also):

1. Shared user membership with vBulletin (of course)
2. Robust community event calendar
3. Decent commerce system
4. Decent other usual stuff (blogs, article submission, etc.)
5. Decent templates
6. Easy to set up for someone still getting their feet wet with this stuff like I am

I don't know of any other CMS that can currently integrate membership with vbulletin, and I have a mere two weeks left on a deadline.

Someone just released something that sounds like what you are looking for. Complete integration between Drupal and vBulletin. For 3.5 and 3.0

this is what i need too; anyone know a way?

I'm intensely interested in this topic too. We (my company) are experienced php/mysql website developers. We are about to start work on a fee-paying member / subscription-based website project. A discussion forum for paid-up members only (no public access, except perhaps read-only, but probably not) will be an important part (of many important parts!) of this.

So what I don't need is advice for integrating vBulletin with drupal, mambo, etc.

What I do need is advice for coding up a membership system in our own custom-written app. which will synchronise the addition and deletion of membership accounts from the primary app. with vBulletin membership.

Obviously I'm not looking for how to code this 'per se' - I'm looking for pointers or a simple 'heads up' for a tutorial or guide to synchronising vBulletin membership data (i.e. username and password if nothing else) with an external app. that we will be hand coding ourselves.

Thanks in anticipation! :-)

P.S. Any solution we implement would have to be rock-solid stable - this site we're working on is aiming for a top quality specialist global audience. Even better would be to achieve this member integration / synchronisation via a rock solid API or similar which 'guarantees' (as far as that's possible) that we can still upgrade to future versions of vBulletin without having to re-mod the code. I've gone down that path before (repeatedly re-modding), and I'm over it!

For the paying members part, you could use the Paid Subscriptions feature of vB. You would only need to integrate your site into that.

I've implemented most of this. What's stopping me now is I'd like being able to control where the user goes after doing a vb registration. I'd like them to chain to the specific registration page on the wrapper site, to gather specific data that the site wants. The register_addmember_complete hook is not in a good place to redirect to another page because it would fire before the registration was truly complete... it fires before the coppa test or the will I send an email test. I'd like to avoid hacking vb if possible.

Perhaps I can make the hook code set a cookie and then have all vb pages check this cookie before firing, if it is set go to the reg page and delete the cookie?

I've accomplished this using the www.amember.com script and its plugin architecture - which is very similar to vB's. Basically you can write simple code that gets called on various events like register, login/logout, modify, delete, etc that does things like do inserts into multiple databases, set/reset multiple cookies so their is a single login point for each app.

I do believe you could accomplish this with vB's hooks but as I started coding a system before 3.5 was released I need other alternatives as I didn't want to hack vB's code. At least it is an alternative for you to look at and/or get ideas.

P.S. there already is a vBulletin plugin for Amember that works out of the box that will automatically add a member to vB and handle paid subscriptions as well as handle single login to amember & vB.

Best,

John