Provide a REST-interface for interactions from/with external applications

[daFish]

Hi,

I'd like to suggest a REST-interface to vBulletin to allow external applications access to your forum.
Ideally the following actions can be taken:


retrieve user information / add new user by remote
same goes for anything else

All addons, e.g. Projecttools, should also use this system so it could improve the use of PT dramatically. Blogs could also benefit from the interface as it would be possible to add new blog posts / comments from remote.

[daFish]

And on another note the REST-interface could also provide a method to authenticate a user against the vBulletin-database.

[David Grove]

I would like to see vBulletin provide two types of API for use in integrating vBulletin and other software, or for unifying two vBulletin sites.


A web-based API (REST) to do things when you're not on the same server.
A class-based API (when you're on the same server)

Both of these APIs should allow you to do the following (this could be expanded later)


Check if a username is valid and available for registering
Register a user
Log a user in
Retrieve user information
Check if user has new messages + total message count
Log a user out

[kmike]

A real API is indeed needed in vBulletin, be it REST or not.