user management software -- integration of entire site

Hello everyone,

I am a newbie and looking for something that can tie in all of my software together. I want it so that when a user visits my website and logs in to my phpbb forum they are automaticall logged into my classifieds(http://www.geodesicsolutions.com/products/classifieds/classifieds_basic.htm) section as well and also my photohosting software and auctions(http://www.phpauction.net/gpl.php). Whenever someone logs into any of the above or changes there profile in any of the above, I want the login or effected change to occur in all software.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
thank you all for any and all help,
sean

woocha: if you think about it, "logging in" means nothing more than storing some info that identifies the user, usually in a cookie or URL. Likewise, updating a user's profile on one site will update some info in a database, and to use that same profile on different site would mean being able to read the database on each of those different sites as well.

To make the login work across sites, each site would just need to identify the user in a standard way. For example, if you log on on phpbb, your id is stored in a cookie on your pc. If you then go and visit phpauction, it would need to be able to understand the cookie that was generated by phpbb. Likewise if you log in on phpaction, both phpbb and geodesicsolutions would need to be able to understand the phpaction cookie (or whatever mechanism they used).

The problem is that while the technology used is identical, not one of these systems will agree on a single protocol. So while one site might store your id as something like



another site might store it as



It would be up to you to choose a standardised protocol, and then find a way to make each site use this protocol.

Two different strategies come to mind, which you could use to get this to work in real life.

The first option is that you could update the source code of each of these sites to use a standardised mechanism which all of the sites will understand. Each new site that you which to support will need to be updated to use the standard mechanism.

The other option you could create a proxy service, meaning that you set up single site that all the traffic goes through, and is routed to each of the other individual sites. The user would log in once to the proxy service. When they wanted to access any other site, the proxy service would translate their login details into a format that the other service could understand.

For example, instead of connecting directly to http://www.geodesicsolutions.com/products/etc/etc, the user would rather go through your site (www.woocha.com) to http://www.woocha.com/geodesicsolutions/products/etc/etc. Your site would accept their login details and store their profile in a single place. Any time they needed to access another site, your site would pass the login details along in a format that the other site could understand.