Importing Users into Serendipity

[Xarex]

This seems to be a common problem I'm having with nearly every external PHP application I'm using, despite sharing the same database for everything I use. I am also wanting to use Vanilla Forums. I want to be able to incorporate an external blog and a forum because they are more powerful and offer more option than my CMS. But external blogs and forums seems as if they are completely separate from the main site I'm running.

WordPress had this option to import users that were already in my database, but WordPress is extremely beefed up and doesn't fit into my website at all. It's basically like a Blog that needs to be completely external and could function on its own. It seems like it's alien from my website, despite having the similar theme. There's just too much in it and so that's why I've chosen Serendipity.

There is no option to import my existing users. I'm not talking about importing them from another forum. My site has a registration and that's where my visitors sign up. Once they've registered, I have their information in the database. That's the only sign up I want. To have users sign up for 2 or 3 things is just horrible for an attempt at a professional website. I've looked and downloaded the plugins I needed but found nothing.

How can I import this user information, specifically the Username and Email address into Serendipity Forums so I don't have to manually put them in there with each new sign up? Once my visitors sign up for my site, all that information should be automatically going into the database.

I am also wondering if there is an option to close registration as they have already signed up via my registration page.

Thanks for your help!


Xarex

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Basically, what you may want is some kind of "proxying" authentication. For serendipity, a LDAP authentication plugin (serendipity_event_externalauth) exists, which one could use to modify to authenticate against other PHP databases.

What it does is check if a useraccount is valid, and if so, import basic data into the s9y database so that a local author account is created automatically.

Creating a user account in s9y is not so hard, you would just need to issue the few INSERT INTOs to the serendipity_authors DB table...

In either way: You'll need custom PHP coding to "marry" multiple independent PHP applications.

Regards,
Garvin