Alex,

In developing the sites, what I would like to do, since I'm running on a dedicated server (as are a good portion of the people) and I have my own MySQL, I would like to pull the user registration/logon/etc information out of the "Links" database, into a USERS database.

I would like all my related sites to use/share the same user information, requesting the fields they need.

For a hard example, let's say I have 3 sites set up.

CreepyCards.com, Postcards.com and the PostcardsPortal.com.

I want _one_ user database between all the sites, and for my wwwthreads forum.

I want that same user base to be used for my catalog system, which while it might be separately installed on each site, for managing different product lines, it would still draw the user information from a central base.

That way, if I'm dealing with a user "troublemaker" I know it's the same ID across my entire network.

While it should be possible to do that, it would be _much_ nicer if the 'sensitive' information was able to be pulled into another database via an option during setup. Since you are working on the user system, I thought I'd throw this in.

Same would go for the advertising/banner system. If a separate database could be used as an option, then it would integrate with a network wide type of installation.

More importantly, it could divide the load across several servers, and separate the permissions and access to make it harder to breach the user database from the directory database.

Because of the way MySQL is set up, with each database as a file system, it would be in keeping with the "modular" and "object" way of thinking to have a "user" object that translated into it's own MySQL database object.

The point being, while keeping a user database inside a 'links' database is possible, and I'm actually doing some very funky legacy things, it would be much nicer (logically) to separate out the various "databases" _AS_ databases, rather than just tables.

make sense what I'm driving at??

http://www.postcards.com
FAQ: http://www.postcards.com/FAQ/LinkSQL/

I agree. In my case I only want to "integrate" links SQL and WWWthreads (not sure exactly how) but I believe something could be done to links to help in this situation. It's highly probable that SO using links (or any other cgi script) will also use other programs...

Because I dont know much about programming I can not give as much details as Pugdog does about how to do it, but I also see this as an important need...

Robert, another LINKS SQL user, is working on integrating WWWThreads and Links SQL...you might find some Threads where he discusses this by searching for WWWThreads in the Links SQL forum. I believe he mentioned that it was not too difficult.

Regards,

Eliot Lee

Thanks Elliot. There was also another user, some time ago (I dont remember his name) that was trying to do the same and from what I saw he was able to do it (there where still some bugs in the demo I saw, and from what I know he put the project on hold). He said it was easy too but, of course, not being a programmer I had troubles with many "easy" things before....

Anyway I am just waiting for the next links release and I'll give it a try...

Regards

Actually, that was a separate forum script called forum.cgi and was written by Jerry Su (Widgetz).

Regards,

Eliot Lee

Hi!

The new Authentication system will be able to handle this. Links SQL still needs a users table to keep track of things like ReceiveMail, Editor Status, Newsletter, etc. But all the authentication and session management is abstracted away.

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.

Very good news, thanks.
BTW I am waiting for the new release to buy links. My site is not online and I want to make several modifications, so it makes sense to wait...
Also there is (at least now, I believe) a free install included. Will this change with the new release? I remember hearing that the new release will have something like a self install file...is that correct?

This sounds good. Is there anyone else out there who uses vBulletin? i want to try and link the 2 together and hope someone else with a little more coding skill is going to be able to help.

Have a look at vbulletin if you havn't got wwwthreads yet anyway.

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal

Hi - I use vbulletin and we could try to help each other out!

Paul Wilson.
(Dont blame me if I'm wrong!)