Desired Features?

[JackDog]

I have a couple questions that I have been unable to find definitive answers to just yet. I am Trying to decide on a product to use for social networking at my company but require a fairly flexible product to integrate well with our existing applications.

Does vBulletin have a robust webservice package for external integration?
->Can I pre-register users?
->Can I pre-authenticate users?
->Can I make posts for users?

I noticed that you can post threads as questions; is there a way to mark questions as answered and award points to replies that help them?

Is there an API/hook where I can perform keyword substitution and transform ordinary text like "Article #234" to a hyperlink that points at an external site for a specific article? This would be display only and not be stored in the DB.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Wayne Luke]

vBulletin does not handle external authentication at this time. This requires some custom programming on your part and a Bridge between your software and vBulletin. vBulletin does include*tools and APIs built into the software that allow you to synchronize your existing user records with the ones that vBulletin requires and would allow you to simulate a single sign-on procedure.*To do this you would use vBulletin's Data Managers.

The data managers are able to handle all the structures and variable types within vBulletin. This is the most efficient way to handle synchronization because of the way that vBulletin handles logins and cookie based authentication for each user. It will also allow you to use vBulletin's session handling techniques since they are different than standard PHP sessions at this time.
*
You can read about the Data Managers in our online documentation at:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/data_managers
*
You can also see the entire vBulletin API at:
http://members.vbulletin.com/api/

Here is a tutorial on how to create a new user automatically:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=82836&highlight=Create+New+User
*
In that thread is are examples that you can use as a basis to handle logins within vBulletin transparently. There is other information available for including external files and classes in vBulletin available at www.vbulletin.org as well.

You can use the built-in prefix system to manually mark threads as answered or look for a plugin to do this automatically at www.vbulletin.org.

vBulletin has a replacement variable system that can be used to replace strings globally. You can also create custom BBCodes to add specialized linking to the system.