How to connect a forum to a site?

Question

My friend wants to connect his custom-built forum to his pre-defined site. This pre-defined site has a forum on it but lacks the features that his custom-built forum has so we want to replace the pre-defined site's forum with his custom-built forum. Problem is we don't know how to connect the custom-built forum with the pre-defined site so users who are signed up to the site can login automatically (without signing up again) to the forum. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Simple ...

Go to Elancer.com or Rentacoder.com and find a programmer that can create a "conversion" program for you.  

Regardless, in order to seamlessly integrate the new without changing login functions ... it's going to take PROGRAMMING.

Someone will have to write it.

If "he" custom built the forum .. then he should have the knowledge to create the code to import the login information from the old. If he didn't write it, go to whoever did and ask for help.

Answer 2

This is possible however not easy.  The old forum probley runs off a mysql database witch contains all of the members information and also all of the posted information.

Now depending on how the custom forum is created what you will need to do is get the origanal database info like :

Hostname (usually localhost)

database user

user password

database name

assuming that the custom forum is written in php you can connect to the database using this code:

$conn = mysql_connect('hostname','username','pas... or die(mysql_error());

$link   = msyql_select_db('database_name',$conn) or die(mysql_error());

If the custom forums is created to work with the old database you shouldnt have a problem.  however mostlikly all the old database table names and fields are not going to be the same and you will have to try to work with it the best you can.

sorry but thats all i can really help you with at this moment.