Integration with your own Web apps

We have a non-membership WordPress + vBulletin site to which we are currently adding a Web app that will allow members to make their own pages, sort of a MySpace idea.

We need member signup and payment capability, plus we'd like the WordPress and vBulletin integration. But our Web app has tables to hold member's app specific settings, and the various personal data that they input to create their own pages.

Is a Member appropriate for such a site? The app needs to know who is signed in, in order to give them access to editing their own area of the site. Would this require extra development on our part? Can it be done? And how much work would it be? In other words, would it be less work for our developers to implement payment from scratch, using the various open source code out there for that, or to use aMember and implement our app integration?

Another question: In signing up for this forum to ask this question, I see that you are using aMember for the vBulletin registration. Nice, eating your own dog food. However, the signup was extremely slow. The confirmation page from the e-mail confirmation link took forever to appear, and after logging in, the account page also took a long time. I'll try registering with an different e-mail later, but are there performance problems with aMember?

I've been thinking a bit about this. Is this how we'd have to handle the integration with our Web app?:

1. Log-in to the site would be via a page or a page in a directory protected by aMember.
   
2. aMember would use either its own database of members, or the member table in our Web app's database. (Which? Either? Can this be configured?)
   
3. Upon log-in, the member can access the directory where the Web app is?
   
4. How would the Web app know who the member is to give him access to his and only his account? Is this an API thing?

Tarfos,

you can purchase the wordpress and vbulletin plugins from amember. They will allow you to integrate the three together. From that point on, your members would use the amember login and they would get authenticated to all 3.

amember allows you to select which role the users signing up will belong to in the configuration. When they sign up for an account on amember, it will create a matching user in wordpress and give them that role in configuration.

Do expect a good week or two of integration work. Specially if you want to make it take on the look and feel of your website. They have templates for you to modify, you just have to go through them and modify them.


I cannot speak of how well the integration works for all of them yet, I am in the process of messing around with it and currently spending my time customizing the screens.

You may want to get the trial version and mess around with it.

Thanks. I've found the list of plug-ins.

For vBulletin, where we have registered users, will we need to have them re-register, or dump them from the database and import them into the database for aMember, or what?

After you have a plugin installed, the "DB Rebuild" feature should syncronize both data bases. You will find this link in the users section of the admin control panrl.

Obviously make a backup first in case something goes wrong!

OK, that sounds easy enough. Thanks!