Forum Integration in a manner of speaking

[mma]

A lot of people ask about getting a script or a plug-in to integrate this script with forum software. But there's some pitfalls to doing that. I have used other versions of this kind of script, and they were very buggy and not secure. What if you integrated your forum database, and some hacker got into your admin panel via this script? You stand to lose quite a bit.

I personaly prefer to keep my forum's database separated from the video script, but at the same time, we have done several things to "integrate" the video system into my forum environment. One of the things we did was create a flash-based RSS feeder that takes the latest videos from the vhsare/rss/new.xml file and embeds them in a small "module" that is on our Vb CMPS main page. We also modified our navbar code to include a link to our video script. We also placed the video script on a separate domain with a .net so our forum/main website is .com, video is .net. We unified the logos, and also added navigation on the video script pages to make it easy to go back and forth.

Yes, members still have to register on the video side, but that's not really a big deal; they can use the same login info. It would be great to have a VB plug-in product, but I am not so sure I would use it, because of the security issues i have seen. I like having the two databases on seperate hosts actually... Safer that way!

[grynmoors]

Yes, I agree about the database thing...what would be nice is how to get the user // login information to also go to the forum database and visa versa, this way all a person has to do is register/login once, yet each script maintains it's own database.

There's a way of doing this, I found out, with some of the ecommerce shopping cart sites and coppermine image gallery, but it requires a "bridge" and I don't know how that's done...takes some kind of php coding.