Bibek Paudel’s weblog

PunBB is a free/open source discussion board built on PHP and MySQL. Because it is lightweight and fast, it is my favorite.

Usually in a website, you have a database of users administered by your own applications. When you decide to add, say a forum like punBB or phpBB, users have to register separately for that forum. Then, if you add a blog like this powered by wordpress, users will have to register for a third time. This is irritating on the users’ side. This is not a good design too. In this post, I intend to describe how I integrated punbb with my web application.

I have a database of users and I want them to be able to use the punbb forums hosted on my server with the same username and password.

1. On my root directory, I have my register.php file through which users can register on my website. In the same level as register.php, I have a “myforum” directory where I have uploaded the files of punbb.
2. When users register on register.php, I want them to be automatically registered for the punbb forums as well.
3. The register.php takes some values from POST method. The variables “username”, “password” and “email” contain the username, password and email respectively supplied by the user through a html form.
4. While installing punbb, I had entered “pun_” as the prefix for its tables. So, I have a table named “pun_users” on my database. I already have “users” table for my application.

This is what I did:

<?php
/*---- file: register.php ----*/
include "myforum/include/functions.php"; /*for the pun_hash function to work*/
$dbhost="localhost"; /*the name of my database host*/
$dbusr="bibek"; /*my mysql database username*/
$dbpass="paudel"; /*my mysql database password*/
$dbname="example"; /*name of my mysql database*/
$connection = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbusr, $dbpass)
or die(mysql_error());
$dbhandle = mysql_select_db($dbname, $connection)
or die(mysql_error());
$usrname=$_POST['username'];
$password=pun_hash($_POST['password']);
$email=$_POST['email'];
$regdate = strtotime ("now"); /*generates UNIX timestamp of current time*/
$groupid = "4"; /*groupid 4 is for normal members of punbb*/
$language = "English";
$timezone = "5.45"; /*assuming all users are from Nepal*/
$punbb_query="INSERT into pun_users (group_id, registered, username, password, email, language, timezone) values ('$groupid','$regdate','$usrname','$password','$email','$language','$timezone')";
$mydb_query="INSERT into users (username,password,email) values('$usrname','$password','$email')";
((mysql_query($punbb_query,$connection)) && (mysql_query($mydb_query,$connection)))
or die ("Couldn't register you..");
?>

A look at the description of the pun_users table will provide you more customizable features but this much will just do your job.

I think that’s all.