Several question regarding account management

[Qingjun Wei]

Hi,
We are a startup company looking for a forum platform. I would like users of our products to use the forum to discuss the products, get technical supports.

I am looking for possibilities to integrate the forum with our own user account management system.

Another problem is that I know a lot of languages but I don't know php very well. So I am wondering if it is possible to directly access the MySQL database through another process.

Here is what I want to do:
1. Automatically create some users and give password to those users.
2. I have zero tolerance with spammers. I would like to turn on manual approval of registration, and have another process to scan the approval queue from the SQL database, then send approval URL with code through SMS message. Once the code is verified, I will then approve the user through another automatically process.

Your comment is appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[dknife]

It is much easier to use the forum systems for account management and there's lots of site-integration support here from users but there is no official support for anything outside of the forum software for site integration.

It also depends on what you need for account management. I use XenForo for user registration, authentication and security groups and the rest of my site is integrated with the XenForo structure for verifying user sessions and security. For my own site's particular functionality there's additional tables and interfaces outside of XenForo but it's entirely possible to build out custom requirements for user profiles within XenForo as well to manage everything in one place.

If you really want separate systems then you can hook into the various functions within the XenForo class structure to add those users and user profile info and even utilize the built-in API. But you never want to inject into the database directly, always interact with XenForo via the provided structure.

 

[Qingjun Wei]

@dknife,
Thanks a lot for your response. Since you mentioned XenForo class structure I would assume you are referring to Xenforo addon. I agree it is a much cleaner solution but it has to be in php.

I also looked into Xenforo REST API. But it seems to be rather limited.

So in the end building my own addon is the way I have to go?