Club Membership integration

[Russ_T]

Hello

I'm webmaster for the z club and I also belong to the PGAC (Peugeot club), the Pug webmaster is my idol and reason I got vB.

On the PGAC board there are two extra options in the profile, member number and expiry date. Somehow these are entered and checked against something (I guess he has a member list) and when these are correct you get access to different places, I guess they set up a members group.

There are LOTS of people joining the club all the time so it must be pretty automated, I would like to do something similar for my clubs website, you can enter a good membership number and this will let you join a club members group which in turn give you more privaleges, I don't want it open to abuse though.

Any ideas please? I suppose I could write a php admin that just works on a online mySql members database so I could update it, then this will allow a hack in my vB to reference the membership number and expiry against this database.

When the membership date expires the user is moved out of the members group until he/she enters a new valid expiry? But if I'm slow to update the members this wouldn't work, maybe they could have 2 weeks grace?

Another point is the member number and expiry fields would have to be admin readable only and no duplicates of the member number would be allowed.

LOTS to think about, I can help a little with this request, sounds fun to me

Thanks guys/gals