Single Sign On with 2 classes of user

[tommythejoat]

Our organization has a public outreach Message Board running vBulletin and several other web sites each with their own local management.

Our membership system maintains accounts for members and provides a collection of core services. The vendor of the membership system has provided a facility that allows members to sign on to that system with a bounceback to one of the other systems. The user's session is marked with a secure token, which is in turn validated by each of the client sites.

I got this all working with vB3.8.4 but it had the defect that new registrations of members with a valid token from the membership system were a bit artificial because I cannot get the password from the membership system.

I am redoing this for vB4.1.8 because the previous code does not work properly due to some hook changes.

I have a plugin that checks to see if a session exists and just exits if it does.

If a session does not exist and the user has a valid token from the membership system, I query for their email address and use that to see if they have an account on the Message Board.

If they have an account, I log them in to that account.

If they do not have an account on the message board, I want to display a modal form that asks for their username and password. The form will be pre-filled with their real name for the username but they can change that if they like. When they press submit, I will use the password and username to create their vBulletin account.

In the previous version I just forced their real name as the username and created a random password for vBulletin.

My problem is that I do not have enough experience with php, buffered output and modal forms to know what I am doing.

We want to leave the standard vBulletin registration and login intact since our non-member users must register to use the message board similarly to the way vBulletin.org works. We end up with visitors, registered non-members and members. Members have access to areas of the Message Board not available to others.

If anyone has some ideas or can show me a solution to this display problem, I would appreciate it.

Our site is http://mb.nawcc.org/