Hi aMember, I have seen your name mentioned quite a lot on Xenforo, so here I am. Hope you have the right solution for me. I have a large Xenforo forum site. I wish to integrate Wordpress with it as a CMS. aMember sits in the middle of Xenforo and Wordpress and allows for shared registration and login. - This is good. However, I do not want two separate profile locations. I prefer members to have xenforo profile, rather than the WP one. Also for them to update and use the Xenforo avatar. Solution would be if you had optional Wordpress plugins that override the default WP profile. (This is what buddypress does). There are also WP plugins that hide various user fields in the profile. Currently users are able to change their username inside of Wordpress, thus having different identities in both WP and Xenforo comment areas. - In future if i wish to stop using aMember what would I do to keep my sites functioning (albeit independent of each other)?
Hi Zooki, thanks for contacting us! Unfortunately, for the task you described, aMember is not best solution. Look at specific Wordpress plugin, or Xenforo plugin that provides integration with another side. aMember will add unnecessary complexity if you use it just for single-login.
I understand some of the above features might be out of the scope of amember. Still am confused because on the website it says: "aMember Pro is able to integrate more than one script. You may use WordPress as CMS, XenForo as forum, and so on. The only requirement is that all registrations and login processes are handled by aMember." and: And I have seen a few websites (including this one it seems) that integrate using amember: http://www.disabilitysanctuary.com/ So what can I expect from using aMember?
I am not the best person to answer this, but I think the part about xenforo being the user manager is the problem. What amember does so well is to manage the user database, then grant access to the other applications from that.
Yes. aMember is able to integrate with many scripts. We are able to do that because aMember becomes master users database, and all integrated scripts becomes slave - aMember creates/updates user records in vBulletin, XenForo, Wordpress and other scripts. There are pros and cons. If you use aMember as payment script with integrated subscription management, affiliate program, helpdesk, shopping cart, etc. then it is reasonable. If you need ONLY users database integration between XenForo and Wordpress, then it adds unnecessary complexity to your system. In case of aMember integration, user profile changes (at least e-mail and password change) must be done via aMember to keep databases in sync.
In the WordPress (WP) documentation this is covered in the very first page: Integration Overview When you perform the aMember/WP integration you configure WordPress and aMember settings so a WP user cannot access the WP back end and populate the profile information. All user information is entered and changed in aMember and gets pushed to the WP db.