User Registration & Custom User DB

[MMAPP]

I have an existing web app with about 10,000 subscribers (LAMP stack). I'd love to use xenforo, but a prerequisite is tight user-integration. Disconnected user databases is a non-starter for me personal. (I dealt with this back in the phpbb and vbulletin days [I owned a very large forum] and I do not care to repeat).

So, with that in mind, can someone please tell me if this is going to be a deal-breaker? We have the dev capabilities to work on just about anything in the PHP/MySQL realm, though if the investment of time would be too great then perhaps a custom solution would be the more pragmatic choice.

I did see in the forums here that someone referenced in API that's currently in Beta (post was from December), though I have found nothing else about this.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Mike]

Disconnected user databases is a non-starter for me personal.

What do you mean by this specifically?

If you generally mean some sort of single sign on type of system (though there would be 2 user DBs maintained: yours and XF's), that would be possible, though it would require a reasonable amount of custom development within XF to handle things like authenticating against your DB, creating XF users, and potentially limiting some changes within XF (like password or email changes).

In terms of the API, there is some overview info here:

REST API | Developer Documentation | XenForo

Developer documentation for XenForo

xenforo.com

That then links to the list of endpoints. You can do things like create users, if you wanted to go down the approach of creating a user in XF when they are created in your DB, for example.

 

[MMAPP]

What do you mean by this specifically?

I meant that, ideally everything would seek auth from an single (my) DB table with usersname / hashed password.

With the API docs you provided, I'm thinking the following is the process:

• Post to API->/users with account info created on my site
• Save the user_id from the return User object into my DB to create the account associations.

Assuming that's true, then my one final question would be about logging in/out. If they login in through my system can they be automatically logged into xenforo also (and vice versa). I see there is a POST auth/ route, although I'm not sure if it would help in this respect.

Thank you.

 

[Mike]

If they login in through my system can they be automatically logged into xenforo also (and vice versa).

This isn't something the API exposes, so it would require something a bit more custom. This is because you'd have to setup/manipulate cookies and sessions for the user when they take action on one part of the site.

 

[Penguinexpert1]

Just to jump on the bandwagon with this one, this was a major feature that I've always wished XF2 had, the ability to use an external database for users. https://xenforo.com/community/threa...-for-external-database-authentication.161321/