vB easy to integrate with - not!

[denniss]

I've asked a few vB integration related questions - how do I create a vB user, change their password, log into vB all from my own custom developed php application that I want vB to be a 'seamless' part of.

I only ever got a response to how to create a user, and I've got that working, thank you.

I appreciate that vBulletin probably wasn't designed to be easy to integrate with. It wants to do everything itself.

However, as a product that we paid money for, I am shocked at the lack of documentation and answers on the forums about integration issues. I see other people asking integration questions and I see precious few answers.

I know other people are grappling over these same issues.

For instance, I want to do something like this:

$vbuser =& datamanager_init('User', $vbulletin, ERRTYPE_ARRAY);
$vbuser->set_existing($vbulletin->userinfo);

and then do something with the object...change password, whatever.

I know I have to include some files -

require_once '/usr/local/apache/htdocs/forum/includes/class_dm.php';
require_once '/usr/local/apache/htdocs/forum/global.php';

But I am running into two different problems:

First, if I try to put this code in a function "things break". I suspect this is a global var issue. What global $vars do I need to list in the function? Is this documented somewhere?

Second, I am having problems with the vB calls stomping on my existing database connections. How can I avoid this? Is this documented somewhere?

I am desperately trying to get password change working so that I can keep my custom built application's password and vBulletin's password in sync. I am now at the point where I am looking at the vBulletin tables and seeing if I can figure out how to change users passwords with sql.

I don't like dropping to this level. I'd rather be at an API level, but the apparent lack of documentation is forcing me down this path.

Is there anyone who can help me out?