How can I integrate users' logins from my site into phpBB?
I need some help with what is probably a newbie question in terms of modifying phpBB.
I have a whole system developed in PHP, and I would like to integrate phpBB so that people can navigate into the forums and post seamlessly, without logging in again.
Now, using the phpBB users table as the users table for my system (and having people register in phpBB instead of in my website) is not possible unfortunately (it'd take more work to redo our system than to build our own basic forum).
I'm assuming I can hack my way into making phpBB believe that a certain user ID has logged in, however, that user won't exist in phpBB's users table (which I'm assuming will cause it to error out pretty much everywhere).
All the tutorials and forum posts I could find implied having phpBB as the primary. I couldn't find anything to do it the other way around.
I'm guessing the only possible way to solve this is by having both tables relatively synchronized.
Now, provided that I can have both users table synchronized, what is the best way to integrate both sites, keeping my site's login and users table as the "primary" ones?
Also, is there anything in particular I should keep in mind when creating records in phpBB's users table? Or is it relatively straightforward to figure out? What tables should I be writing to, if there is more than one?
Answer
This is an old question so I'm sure you've worked something out by now, but if you need to refactor things in the future, this is entirely possible with authentication plugins in phpBB3:
http://wiki.phpbb.com/Authentication_plugins
I'm working on one now where phpBB is the "secondary" system, and it's going pretty well.