Is there an amember API that can be used if people want to send members in my direction and register their information directly into amember instead of having to make members register themselves? I know that someone did a Facebook Connect implementation that makes this possible so I'm guessing that there has to be some documentation to accomplish this. Essentially, these people have another forum and want to send them to us and provide all their registration information which can then be entered into amember so they can easily have their posts and membership information from that site entered on our site.
David - Thanks much and I'll take a look at this but here is my problem. I'll have to look at the solution for long term and the interface will probably take longer to use. Right now I've got a plugin which is trying to register users directly into vbulletin and uses those registration functions. It puts in username, password and email address directly into the database. email has already been pre-authenticated. If I allow them to link this, then I'll end up with registrations into vbulletin that will not be entered into amember. Logins won't work since the users haven't been entered into amember. Now I have two choices if I can somehow "sync" the users registered in vbulletin into the amember database. I can (a) obtain md5 passwords passed with the user information for every user that registers with vbulletin or (b) I can live with the current password being changed during a sync with vbulletin as is the case when you click the button that syncs all the databases - but that is time consuming. Can you or anyone suggest a recommended solution? I'm a bit stuck here. Until now my amember system has worked very well.
I would focus on replacing the plugin that is registering users into vBulletin, especially if it is doing via direct dB access. aMember should be your master record for users, with 3rd parties being the slaves. Perhaps if you explain a bit about what you are trying to accomplish with the plugin we can assist.
I am hoping to go directly into amember but there is a problem. 1) Users are being registered on a third party site and passed to me. 2) Users are registered directly into vBulletin but I can arrange to have passwords passed to me in MD5 instead of SALT. 3) amember currently doesn't use MD5. Plugging in the MD5 into the database will cause an obvious problem. If I could get it to register in amember, I would although it is an expensive proposition I am guessing, even though it is just user name, password and email address. There must be other variables that must be present to pass to amember, which then must also seed VB. 4) This also may include the posting of a post on the member's wall after the user is registered, problematic if amember is the primary database since you must wait until sync occurs until the user is active in VB to post to the user wall.
Is your forum protected by aMember? If aMember handle logins for your forum, this is possible to modify login code and check vBulletin database as well if user not exists in aMember. So, for example if user will be added to your forum from external vBulletin forum, when he will try to login into aMember, it will check internal database first, if user is not exists in internal database, it will check vBulletin database, and if user exists here, it will create an account for that user and handle login usual way. But this will work only if aMember will handle all logins (because we can get clean password on login)
Alexander - that is awesome. I'll send you a private email - thanks again for the great support here. My site wound function without you guys and I have a LOT of stuff running. Amember handles registration and login for all my scripts. The placement of a password into VB can be without the VB salt, only md5. The problem is that my database is not MD5 (it probably should be) and I'd update if it meant MD5 password protection. If amember can copy the vb password into the amember database, all would work perfectly. The reason it works this way is because the partner is collected users and passing them over to me, which is fantastic. Nice to get traffic. Thanks so much guys.
aMember can check password that is entered in login page. At this stage aMember will have plain password and can encrypt it like vBulletin does then check with password that is stored in vBulletin, if passwords will match new account will be created.