Auto Forum Registration

[xxkylexx]

Heya Matt,

Just thought it might be a cool idea to develope some type of system that would automatically register new hosting customers on the company's forum. I use phpbb, and thought this would be a great idea for getting initial customers automatically registered on there.

Just a thought. I'm not sure how much work this is or if it is even possible.


Kyle

[chrishaley]

I'd love to see this as well. Also, a nice little script to take your current customers and create the forum account would be nice too. :)

[Steve]

I don't really see the point in this, if they wanted to use your forum then they would sign up themselves. Just because an account is automatically created for them it doesn't mean they will use it. ;)

Plus, there are so many different forums out there it will be hard to make this for all of them and keep it up to date.

[Adam]

Hey,

You can edit your forum software so it pulls information from the WHMCS database like email and password. I know vBulletin you have the option of doing one such thing, (having users use their email). Then you just edit a few line of code and your done. How ever I'm not sure if this is such a good idea lets say some one new signs up on your forum, this will also add them to the WHMCS database and might make the system go nutts.

From,
Adam

[Roger]

Definetly wouldn't want new user data flowing from forum->WHMCS. But I wouldn't mind a WHMCS->forums connection. Or be able to give the new client the option of auto-joing the 'Support Forums'.

I know there are many "bridges" available to look at for examples. First that comes to mind are all Joomla/Mambo bridges to SMF, and I think it's MKPortal (maybe MD-Portal) that will reach out to several CMS's. Joining a forum to another app is not a new idea.

The unique thing here is that a user doesn't just join your WHMCS. They are added on their first purchase. So adding them to a SMF, phpBB or whatever forum wouldn't be that difficult at that point if the code was available. But it is encoded at the moment. We know that Matt is working on breaking some of the encoding down so we can access more for customizations.

One thing that does come to mind is the trigger action is not a one time occurance. Because a user is added to CMS on first purchase and doesn't 'join'. So there would have to be some type of logic to determine if the user had been already added to the forums tables. That would probably be prettty simple to sort out.

My 2 cents .... 8)

[xxkylexx]

Sounds good. The whole idea was to go from WHMCS > Forum. I like the idea of allowing them to tick a box or something on the order form, if they want to auto-register or not.

[Devon]

Heya Matt,

Just thought it might be a cool idea to develope some type of system that would automatically register new hosting customers on the company's forum. I use phpbb, and thought this would be a great idea for getting initial customers automatically registered on there.

Just a thought. I'm not sure how much work this is or if it is even possible.


Kyle

Upon user registration you can have it execute a script which submits an INSERT query to your forum databse using the information from the registration.
Also, I beleive in a previous conversation I had with Matt, you can have it update the foum password when the user updates his in the WHMCS client area because that file is not encoded.
(Not sure about that 2nd part as I havn't gotten around to trying it yet but I beleive that is what was mentioned.)

[Roger]

It's all a matter of matching the field names in the proper WHMCS table with the field names in the proper forums table. Add a blank record, insert the data...

Once you can access the data. The rest should be pretty easy. You want the data in real time ideally ... BUT I suppose a cron could run hourly or when ever that could grab data straight out of the WHMCS table.... hmmmm ...... Would be more involved then. Have to separate whats new and from whats not....

Just thinking outloud....

[Devon]

It's all a matter of matching the field names in the proper WHMCS table with the field names in the proper forums table. Add a blank record, insert the data...

Once you can access the data. The rest should be pretty easy. You want the data in real time ideally ... BUT I suppose a cron could run hourly or when ever that could grab data straight out of the WHMCS table.... hmmmm ...... Would be more involved then. Have to separate whats new and from whats not....

Just thinking outloud....

Correct.. To a certain point. You also have to take into considderation how different systems create the MD5 Hash for the password. For example, vB uses the joined date combined with the password to create the MD5 Hash.

Also, you could just have it connect to a seperate database and read the user/pass if you have access to the system's source code. (Such as vB/phpBB/Kayako Support Suit Owned)
However, this will also increase the load on your database.

[Roger]

Well, as I said in closing ... just thinking out loud.... :)

But I think if that part of the WHMCS source is ever un-encoded. Then it's pretty doable. Each forum would require it's own 'bridge' from WHMCS. None are the same. ie the vB md5 hash technique you mentioned.

I'm just going to wait and see if that part of WHMCS's code becomes accessible. Hey Kyle we'll get it going with phpBB and SMF .. :!:

[active8]

any more on this one??

thx

[Harrison]

Sounds like a good idea (especially for VBulletin) but I think Matt's got enough on his plate atm :P

[xxkylexx]

I don't think this would have to really be an exact feature of WHMCS. Doesn't it have the ability to execute a script after the order, which could be coded by anyone?

Just giving ideas, I don't want WHMCS to get swamped with unnecessary features.

Kyle

[Matt]

Hi,

The main problem with auto forum account creation is that most forums require a username for the user - but WHMCS uses an email address for login. So, the user would need to enter a username that is just for the forum on the signup form, their email which they use to login to WHMCS, and then get a different username for their hosting control panel! All seems a bit complicated to be doing at signup - I think I'd rather have clients sign up to the forum if they wanted to.

Just my thoughts...

Matt

[xxkylexx]

Hi,

The main problem with auto forum account creation is that most forums require a username for the user - but WHMCS uses an email address for login. So, the user would need to enter a username that is just for the forum on the signup form, their email which they use to login to WHMCS, and then get a different username for their hosting control panel! All seems a bit complicated to be doing at signup - I think I'd rather have clients sign up to the forum if they wanted to.

Just my thoughts...

Matt


Agreed. Trash this idea from my point of view. :)

[Francisco]

Hi,

The main problem with auto forum account creation is that most forums require a username for the user - but WHMCS uses an email address for login. So, the user would need to enter a username that is just for the forum on the signup form, their email which they use to login to WHMCS, and then get a different username for their hosting control panel! All seems a bit complicated to be doing at signup - I think I'd rather have clients sign up to the forum if they wanted to.

Just my thoughts...

Matt

I would love to see this feature. We can ask the Customer which username they would like to have or use the same username they have on cPanel, with the option to change their username (ONLY once) thru WHMCS.

[SM-John]

Hi,

The main problem with auto forum account creation is that most forums require a username for the user - but WHMCS uses an email address for login. So, the user would need to enter a username that is just for the forum on the signup form, their email which they use to login to WHMCS, and then get a different username for their hosting control panel! All seems a bit complicated to be doing at signup - I think I'd rather have clients sign up to the forum if they wanted to.

Just my thoughts...

Matt

I would love to see this feature. We can ask the Customer which username they would like to have or use the same username they have on cPanel, with the option to change their username (ONLY once) thru WHMCS.Using the username from any of the control panels supported is VERY BAD and is a security issue. I suggest making a section in the client so that when they login they see an area that says:

To take full advantage of our support, we recommend that you activate your forum account! In order to do this, please click here!

Then when they click on it, it asks them for their username and password, grabbing their email address from WHMCS and inputing the rest of the data default.

[Francisco]

Hi,

The main problem with auto forum account creation is that most forums require a username for the user - but WHMCS uses an email address for login. So, the user would need to enter a username that is just for the forum on the signup form, their email which they use to login to WHMCS, and then get a different username for their hosting control panel! All seems a bit complicated to be doing at signup - I think I'd rather have clients sign up to the forum if they wanted to.

Just my thoughts...

Matt

I would love to see this feature. We can ask the Customer which username they would like to have or use the same username they have on cPanel, with the option to change their username (ONLY once) thru WHMCS.Using the username from any of the control panels supported is VERY BAD and is a security issue. I suggest making a section in the client so that when they login they see an area that says:

To take full advantage of our support, we recommend that you activate your forum account! In order to do this, please click here!

Then when they click on it, it asks them for their username and password, grabbing their email address from WHMCS and inputing the rest of the data default.

Sounds good, you're right.

[SoftDux]

I don't want to change the subject, but this kind of cross DB injection could be usefull. We use a mysql driven mailing list, and it would be very handy if the user's email address, name, etc could automatically be put into the same mailing list's DB upon registration. Luckily I don't need the user's to logon, and if they do, it will use the email addresses, but to standardise (aka using the same email address & password) on both sides would be ideal.

[Yellow]

I've seen this done, my ISP bethere.co.uk use it on their forum.

[kapone]

Add a customfield in Client Area for username to use in forum.