newbie question on adding tools to vbulletin

[colm]

hiya,

i work for a small isp where we use vbulletin forums (3.6 currently) to help support our customers.

we now have a requirement to provide a web tool to our users which would show a user their bandwidth usage over the last 30 days or so.

i've already devloped such a tool for internal use based on perl and gd::graph.

since most of our customers are happy using vbulletin i was wondering how difficult it would be to integrate a tool like this directly into vbulletin.

the idea would roughly be that -
1) user enters hidden auth details in their profile to access tools
2) new tool menu appears if auth detail present and validated against external auth db.
3) first option on tool menu will either run php which will pull data from bandwidth usage db and build graphs or could wget/curl output from perl cgi.

do you guys have any advise on setting this up?

thanks for your help,

colm

[Dismounted]

Not hard at all if the output can be taken directly from your Perl script. As mentioned by yourself, a cURL call or similar can be made to get the content. Assuming the authentication DB is MySQL and the vBulletin DB user has [read] access to it, the verification should also be simple.

Have a look in the Articles section - especially at the one about creating a vBulletin-powered page.

[colm]

thanks dismounted.

i've looked throught the article you suggested and setup a basic test page.

i have some more queries about the details of implementing this -
1) how would my php page access custom profile fields?

2) how would i setup a db connection and queries to a local mysql database?

3) how would i curl a url and include the results (which would include inline images) in my output?

thanks again for your excellent advise.

colm

--------------- Added [DATE]1246442599[/DATE] at [TIME]1246442599[/TIME] ---------------

hi all,

one problem i've come up against is that we would like customers to be able to enter their service username and password into their profile. these are totally separate to their vb credentials.

this data would then be used to authenticate access to any tools we made available in vbulletin.

however, we wouldn't want their password displayed in plaintext to anyone and ideally it should be stored as a hash to reduce the security risk.

is this possible? if so, where would i need to start looking for information on how to do this?

thanks again for your help,

colm