Drupal may be able to do it, but at incredible cost and research and at the expense of being able to "get started" fairly quickly, as Drupal masters aren't exactly as widespread as general PHP or RoR practitioners.

I would argue that Drupal costs far less than other CMS frameworks, requires far less research to get started quickly, that the Drupal community is larger and more mature than the RoR community, and that PHP executes far faster than Ruby in web application environments.

Essentially, it's a lot more work to get two systems synchronised than it is to just use the existing code for user management and the like. Doing it any other way would be repetition of effort. If you don't run PHPBB's function session_pagestart() then you would have to make sure you read the values of the session cookie yourself, parse them, and query the database to work out who it is. That's more work for little gain, in my mind.

I understand that you might feel tied or trapped to one product if you do it this way. I just maintain it's less effort. The choice is of course yours

I can't off hand see what I misunderstood - care to enlighten me?

It's more that I felt as though you were encouraging a system built on top of phpBB rather than building an entirely stand-alone system that integrated with phpBB.

Admittedly, truly understanding is difficult in these short snippets. I certainly meant no offense by any possible misunderstanding - on my part or yours. If anything, I viewed it as a failure to be clear on my part.

Amorya, I think you've misunderstood the question in some ways, but you have reminded me that both phpBB and vBulletin do allow for extra fields. We aren't required to use them in the forum section of the site, after all… Thanks.

I can't off hand see what I misunderstood -- care to enlighten me?

I was under the impression that you wanted to use PHPBB's member database and permissions manager in pages you were coding yourself in PHP, to maintain a single username/password combo for each member, rather than having them log into the forums and the site separately. Is this not the case?

If you are wanting to interface PHPBB with other (free or commercial) existing scripts, then you'll either need scripts that know about PHPBB, or to use the Authentication Plugin functionality that exists in PHPBB3 beta.

Have a look at http://www.scifiminds.net -- a site that is kinda inactive these days (alas) but demonstrates the tech I'm talking about. The same login is used to post stories and access the secure areas, and for the forum.

You can add new fields to the members table with no problem at all. They all get stored in $userdata[] -- it's just a dump of the current member's row.

For your different user levels, the groups function would be appropriate. Make a few groups for different user levels, hardcode those group IDs into your script, then use PHPBB's user management interface to handle adding and removing users from the group. (Set it to a closed group, so users can't add themselves.) Users can be members of multiple groups with no problem.

Finally, don't forget to change $phpbb_root_path to whatever it is! I suggest you leave PHPBB itself in a folder, and have your own files outside that folder -- in that case, use a root path of './phpbb/' or something.

For example:

define('IN_PHPBB', true);
$phpbb_root_path = 'bboard/';
include($phpbb_root_path . 'extension.inc');
include($phpbb_root_path . 'common.'.$phpEx);

$userdata = session_pagestart($user_ip, PAGE_INDEX);
init_userprefs($userdata);

$page_title = 'Homepage';
include($phpbb_root_path . 'includes/page_header.'.$phpEx);

// Do stuff here

include($phpbb_root_path . 'includes/page_tail.'.$phpEx);

If you don't want to use PHPBB's header and footer templates, omit the last two include lines.

You can then get the current member's information by reading $userdata (for example, $userdata['username'] or $userdata['user_id']).

You can get a list of members with:
$sql = "SELECT * FROM " . USERS_TABLE;

You can work out if a user is currently logged in by checking $userdata['user_logged_in']. The code that goes at the top of your page starts the PHPBB session on every page.

To check the user is a member of a given group, use:
$query = "SELECT * FROM '.USERS_TABLE.' WHERE group_id = '194' AND user_id = ". $userdata[user_id] . " LIMIT 1";

(Obviously replace the 194 with the ID of the group you want to check membership of. This can be useful for things like a moderator area.)

To check if a user is an admin, use $userdata['user_level'] == ADMIN;

These things all work for PHPBB 2. Things have changed a bit in PHPBB 3, but since it's still in beta I've not re-learned everything yet.

I recommend Drupal…

I don't believe that any one package will be so easily modified to suit the specific needs of this site in a more economical fashion than building a custom application. Drupal may be able to do it, but at incredible cost and research and at the expense of being able to "get started" fairly quickly, as Drupal masters aren't exactly as widespread as general PHP or RoR practitioners.

I'll email you, though, as perhaps I'm wrong or perhaps you may even be interested.

Steve said on February 21, 2007:

Sounds like you need custom written MySQL/PHP database stuff. You can always search VB sites to see if it's been built already, but sounds like you already have what you want in mind.

Steve, that misses the point. I know that I need a custom-designed site. What I'd like is to not have to write an entirely new forum package. I am interested in hearing whether existing forum packages allow their "members" table to be expanded upon and/or used outside of the forum itself.

Vbulletin.org is going to be the best search option.