Automatic registration / login

[itomic]

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!