Database Solution Needed

ptek

Hello,

I need assistance trying to figure out conceptually how to create a single username/password across many off the shelve products and custom ones as well. Let just say I installed vBulletin, word press and a custom classified software all using mysql and php. These all have a seperate database or prefixed so that the tables could be seperated logically in a MYSQL single instance. Unfortunately, when you think about it, it would be awful if your users would have a different username and password for all of these tools, let alone, to have to login to them all seperately on every ocassion.

My question is, how do people solve these problems. What is the concept behind it without going too much into the programming aspect. The programming side I can figure out, but I need help understanding the standard approach for something like this, if there is one. I would hate to have inconsistency problems between two tables.

Regards,

-Mark Whitsett

Shrike

The plain answer is most of the time, they don't solve this problem. Each piece of software has it's own security policies and database structures, so they can't and won't integrate with another piece of software unless it is written in to begin with. LDAP is the standard way to approach single sign on, but again it's something that is written in to an application, not added afterward.

You might want to look at writing some sort of login manager with PHP. Users would log into your login manager, and it would go off and do the necessary authentication with the relevant application. Of course this still means you have user accounts stored in more than one place.