Use external authentication system?

[sbl]

We are considering using vBulletin as part of our customer support service. We already have in place a customer account creation and login service that is tied to many different processes. We would like to be able to have vBulletin "call out" to our registration server to authenticate users and allow accounts created in our existing system serve for the forums. The authentication service would also provide some additional attributes for the user to be applied when viewing their posts (and to affect their permissions), similar to your Priority Forum Support.

I've been looking through the documentation and searching this forum but have not found anything related to this other than a request for future support of OpenID (not what we're looking for.) I imagine that there is a way to do this using plugins and a bit of code. but I have not found any pointers or examples. Please point me in the right direction. Thanks.

[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. This is because of the way that vBulletin handles logins and cookie based authentication for the duration of the session.

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.

[sbl]

Thanks, Wayne, that is very helpful.