Integrating vBulletin with existing user management system

[Noreast]

Hi and thanks in advance for any responses to this question.

We have a site that already has a pretty extensive user management system. We would like to have vBulletin on this site integrated with our pre-existing user management system.

First question: Is there anything built in to vBulletin or any mods I can download that would allow me to do this with relatively little coding on my end? I saw a few threads about this topic and one of them implied that something like this was scheduled for a future release, but it was unclear if it was ever actually released or still in development.

Second question: If such a feature does not exist, is vBulletin modifiable enough that I can do it myself? In other words, can I dig in to the PHP code of vBulletin once it's on our server, or is it somehow protected? (I'm mainly a ColdFusion guy and I know in ColdFusion there's a way to encode applications so the code isn't viewable or editable. I don't know if such a feature exists in PHP.)

[DelphiVillage]

1) there are mods that do this www.vbulletin.org (http://www.vbulletin.org) (you must be licenced before you can download anything)
2) vBulletin is not opensource however it's source code is not encoded and "human readable" note that modifying the original source code is at your own risk


PHP applications can be encoded to www.ioncube.com (http://www.ioncube.com) or www.zend.com (http://www.zend.com)

[Noreast]

Thanks for the response. We have since bought vBulletin, but when I searched vBulletin.org for a mod to do this, I didn't find anything. I even posted a thread (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=138632) over there asking about this and no one has responded to it yet.

Can anyone direct me to the mod(s) that do this? Thanks so much.

[feldon23]

You're saying you have a "pretty extensive user management system". I'm guessing you programmed this yourself or hired a programmer to develop this?

I am guessing you have a proprietary user system developed on top of ColdFusion? Then you are going to have some work ahead of you learning enough PHP to make sense of the vBulletin user system and writing a "bridge" to handshake between the two applications.

I have to be honest, most people scrap their existing user system and make their website run on top of vBulletin. Once you include a few vBulletin files like global.php, then you have a handful of functions you can check against to see if the user is logged in, what usergroup they're in, and their user preferences.

[How-To] Add New Users (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=82836)
[How-To] Creating Custom Pages & Misc. (powered by vBulletin) (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=98009)
[How-To] Simple vB User login and access control on non vB pages (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=132996)

vBulletin does not officially support integrating their forums with other scripts such as websites. It's a weakness that I hope is being addressed with vBulletin 4.0.