vBulletin as Authentication

[ee99ee]

Hi. We have a large forum community that we have taken ownership of running on vBulletin 4. We have an in-house application (written in PHP w/ Zend Framework) that we want to integrate authentication into vBulletin with. We want users to be able to use the same login and only have to login once (to the forum).

Any suggestions on how to get started? The most simple way I can think of would be to detect the cookie of vBulletin (if such exists) to see if the user is logged in, and then store the user's ID in our custom application as a reference to the user. So, our application would have no concept of users or passwords, just the ID to reference from vBulletin.

-Chris