Hello all,

Recently signed up to this site but I have been reading the articles for some time with interest and gained some valuable information but I thought I would finally register to actually ask a question!

I've been building a couple of sites recently that are community based from scratch and the only thing I have got from elsewhere is Pear:auth for use in logging in. Now I have previously coded my own simple forums but in todays world everyone wants something more flashy, having read through some other posts my 2 choices for a ready made forum are VBulletin (would be prepared to pay for it) and I understand this has a large fanbase, or I would use getvanilla (found out about through this site) where the appearance would fit slightly better and I could probably customise it without too much trouble oh plus it's free. Now the problem I have is that every other section on the site I have use Pear Auth for authentication and as such using either one of these forums would require integration. Has anyone previously accomplished this? If so would you be willing to share your solution (either forum package). If not I will most likely try and tackle the getvanilla forum myself.

Many Thanks

Hi. I can't really offer you much advice but I just wanted to stop and welcome you to the community. I've done an extensive amount of vBulletin hacking on DaniWeb, but have never played with replacing their login. I'm also pretty involved with the vB community, and while I don't know anyone who has done what you're requesting, they do have a pretty good API so it SHOULD be possible.

However, both forum solutions have fully exposed code, so it would be possible to replace either login function - it's just a matter of time/convenience if one of them already happens to have Pear support.

Putting that aside, I would definitely figure out which solution is the best for you overall (it seems that Vanilla is) and then figure out the login problem.

I wouldn't want to see you going with a forum system just because it's ultra easy to integrate the login and then find that, once a user is logged in, the actual forum system itself isn't ideal for you.

Hi thanks for replying,

I've started to look at integrating Vanilla, purely because at the moment it is free and I don't want to spend money on vbulletin and then find out I can't integrate it. I've found a lot of information on the integration already it's just a question of finding a bit of time now to do it and I will of cause post my findings/solution on here. Just one question, if I did pay for vbulletin with an owned license am I restricted to just using it on a one license one site basis? The information at the top of the purchase page says 'The owned license will allow you to run the software on your server for an unlimited amount of time' now if I have a dedicated server in theory could I run this on multiple sites?

A vBulletin owned license will power ONE forum for an infinite amount of time. If you have a load balancer and need to install the software across multiple web servers, that's fine as long as just one database is being powered. (vBulletin also has built-in support for database replication across multiple database servers). But one license = One forum system, not the other way around. You are allowed to have a second installation to use as a test system, as long as there isn't public access to it.

Ok thanks for that info on VBulletin.

In terms of integration with getvanilla I've managed to get it so that when a user logs into my site they are also logged into the forum. It's just a question of editing your own user database table and pointing the vanilla config at the rows in that table. The document on their site about wordpress integration pretty much gives you all the information. The next bit is just setting the vanilla cookies in your own login script. I'm managing to set these cookies but only in a fudged roundabout sort of way ( I have a check to see if users are active and i set the cookies here). I think I need to edit the main login handler for Pear:Auth to include the setting of these cookies so if anyone knows how to go about that please post. The only other problem I'm having at the moment is that logging out from the main site is not logging users out of the forum. I've tried both as well as

or whatever the order is for setting time to negative
so any help here or if people know how I could implement the vanilla logout script in my logout script that would be appreciated.

You should post your question in the Existing Scripts forum in the Web Development category. You're not going to find many programmers reading this thread.

A bit of revived interest in this topic, I see you've done a lot of tweaking for vBulletin on here, but as I'm still not familiar with it I wonder if you could clear some things up.

If I used vBulletin and the user system within it can I:

a) Customize the user account pages so users can create more "community site" style profiles then "forum" profiles (e.g with galleries etc. etc.)
b) Is it easy enough to implement the authentication system of vBulletin into other areas of the site? e.g If I had a Gallery page that I only wanted logged in members to view is this possible?

I'm fully aware that the gallery etc. would require external scripts or extra development but I'm able to do this. I guess the main point is Can i build a site based upon vBulletin authentication, using the actual forum side of it as a sub-area of a larger site that also uses the vBulletin login?