As Ive looked over many forums and countless user requests for forums to do particular things one thing Ive noted is that most webmasters agree integration is the toughest part of creating a quality forum on our sites.

What no forum Ive ever seen has allowed me to do is define a table and fields where an existing username and password are stored.

Imagine installing a forum and then you can either choose to use the installed user table and create all new users OR, define a table name and the fields for username and password (basically tell the forum to map itself to other tables and fields) and tie into an existing data store of users.

Now, I have only thought briefly about the logistics and coding of such a feature but the point is.. if I had 2000 users in a subscriber database and a lot of time and/or money spent building a user management system, it could be hugely beneficial to install the IF forum and then tell it to look to myTable.UName and myTable.Passwrd for its user listings.

Well, thats my epiphany for the month... what does everyone think? Am I out of my mind or would something that did this allow people to quickly link up existing users with an IF forum?

Comments?

I like that idea.  The only thing that would need to be worked out is what type of security they are using for their passwords.  For example, I typically hash the password with a specific salt (this salt could change from site to site so that passwords are unique).  The login mechanism would have to know how to handle that so it could translate a plain text password into the hashed password.

What might be beneficial is if we could also indicate the assembly and method to use to verify login which IF could tell us what the API should be for that.  it would be simple enough.

We have possible 180 sites going up that will all share username and password.

We would love this feature.