I am considering different forum software for a commercial site that has an existing user database. One requirement is that the software be customizable to support login and registration in a seperate database. In other words I user register through another process. When they access the forum, they are already logged into the web site and should not have to log in again. Also, they can not create accounts in the forum software, they can only create an account through our external process.

Some forum software accomplishes this by custom programming on the web site setting specific cookies that the forum software looks for. Does this software support that functionality?

Thanks.

-Darrell

Hi Darrell,

Out of the box, no. However there is a plugin system available, and a very versatile authentication system. It would be easy for us to put together a plugin that authenticates off however you like (i.e. via cookie, sql database, .htaccess, etc). The advantadge of a plugin is that it separates your custom changes from the code, and allows you to upgrade the program without having to re-implement the changes.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.

That sounds great. Is the development of the plugin performed by Gossamer, or is this custom development that I would need to take on? I am a VB/ASP developer, but not a Perl developer.

I looked at ASPFastForum and the way they do it is if a certain flag is set then the forum software looks for a cookie that has the userid. If the userid is not in the forum database then a record is created for that user. In my situation I don't want the registration process in the forum software to ever be visible to the user. When the user logs into my system, I can set the appropriate cookie that the forum software will look for.

-Darrell

I'm with ddavis - I think this would be great! We're looking to do something similar (with a SQL user db); it's one of the reasons we're also looking at Jive (our site in general is Java-centric; but GF has a lot more features right out of the box, so our technical guy is letting me try it out).

Hi,

It's something we can do as a custom job, or you can take on (although we could put one together really quickly and tailor it to whatever authentication scheme you need).

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.