Forum Intergration

[dweiruk]

Hi I am wondering if their is a way we can add a forum intergration for login as a support option as would be good or even as a addon from a developer or 3rd party

[bunny]

+1

[Paul]

How do you picture this working? A single sign on between Blesta and your forum software?

[bunny]

I think ,new account registration sends the data from Blesta DB to the DB forum - login , password, id custemer (username) and email. Forum will send an activation link.

[Paul]

This would be entirely dependent upon what forum software you use. This could be created as a plugin, or a modification of the order plugin. (Preferably its own plugin)

[John]

What would be nice is if Blesta built in a SAML authentication server (or something like that).

 

Then clients could auth to one central place (Blesta) and from there they could log in to anything that supports SAML.

 

Currently the shared login plugin does the exact opposite (allows you to login to Blesta from something else). Considering Blesta is somewhat the 'core' of any hosting business, I would like to see Blesta become some sort of authentication provider.

[dweiruk]

I am thinking a ipboard bridge for logins

[Allan]

Problem I can see is there are so many different forum software, IPB, Xenforo, VBullentin are just the top three paid, then you have the free software like PhpBB, Mybb, Smf and a couple others. It would be great but also a lot of work.

[Michael]

36 minutes ago, Allan said:

Problem I can see is there are so many different forum software, IPB, Xenforo, VBullentin are just the top three paid, then you have the free software like PhpBB, Mybb, Smf and a couple others. It would be great but also a lot of work.

Not really since Blesta have the shared login which would work for this. Just need to work out how to connect them up to the forums.

[Allan]

My experience with forums though is just about everyone connects differently.

[timnboys]

Yes I can say though I built a api integration into ipb to check banned status via a api call and another api call method to tell the script calling if it should check for banned status or not. 

[mrrsm]

On 12/4/2016 at 11:48 AM, Allan said:

My experience with forums though is just about everyone connects differently.

You wouldn't have a universal one. In reality the shared login will allow you to create a plugin/module for any of the forums out there in order to do a SSO style login.  From there you can also use the API to do whatever else you need to do with the user's account.  It shouldn't take much more than an hour per forum as long as there was some boilerplate plugin/module framework as most of them do similar things for handling login hooks as most of your code is the same between them.

[Paul]

We have some docs on our shared login plugin here - https://docs.blesta.com/display/user/Shared+Login which may be a good starting point for any integration.