This past week I've been porting a custom article system I wrote for Code Newbie to Drupal. The forums remain in vBulletin and that is the master user system.

The tricky part here is that the Code Newbie user base is in vBulletin. Surprisingly enough it wasn't that difficult utilize Drupal's user_external_login_register(). function.

The user profile pages redirect to the vBulletin profile page so the go-between of the two systems is transparent. Admins however are able to access the drupal user profile and get a link to the vbulletin user profile.

If the user is not logged in, I check for a vbulletin cookie in hook_init(). If a cookie exists, then I attempt to validate the user based on the cookie and vb database. Keep in mind I have both sets of tables in the same MySQL database prefixed differently.

The last tricky part was to handle the logouts. Once the user logs out of drupal, I'm using hook_user() to create their logout hash and send them over to the vbulletin logout page.

If there's interest, I may consider releasing the vBulletin integration module, however I am not up to maintaining it by myself. What I wrote was purely for Code Newbie's needs and I know everyone has different needs which is beyond the time I can commit to developing this.