How do I match my sites registration with that of VBulletin

[Allison@RIG]

Last question tonight. My apologies, and I hope some of this stuff is useful to other new people.

Ok, this is a big one. People have to register to join my site and be able to do all of the public posting for a few reasons (we at least need to gather potentially valuable information about the green building market to be able to give out free memberships to the database we have invested in. And members can rate products, so we need them to register for a few reasons), and they get a username and password when they do this.

So, how do we seamlessly integrate the passwords they already have with our VBulletin forum? Our current plan is to manually register everyone for the forum with the passwords they give us when they register. We will get an email that they joined our site, and we will race to sign them up for our forum - and then send them an email that they are all set to sue the forum. Besides this being annoying (and we don't really mind), there is a time delay here when someone will have registered but won't be able to use the forum. That I fear greatly because it affects our credibility and usefulness.

So, my question has 2 parts:

1. How do I make their site name and password their VBulletin site name and password seamlessly if possible?

2. Once I do this, is there a way that they can sort of just be able to get to the forum through our nav bar as a logged in member without having to reenter information?


I would greatly appreciate any help with this. I am not a techie, and our programmer is working hard to build our ratings functionality... That leaves me working on our forum!



-Allison Friedman
Rate It Green

(Live Thursday night with help some of you already gave - thanks!)

[Colin F]

Allison,

1. You'd need a custom script that'd add users to the forum. I recommend you use the Datamanagers for this. See this part of the manual for more information on implementing those: http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/data_managers

2. Again, you'd need some custom code, that inserts a session into vBulletins session table and then sets the cookie on the users computer.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

If you can export your current users to a CSV (Comma Seperated Values) file, then you could use ImpEx to pre-create the user accounts.

[Colin F]

That'd be a one-time thing to merge your current users though, and wouldn't work for new users.