SupportTrio now supports external login sources for both public and admin sections.  We included LDAP and vbulletin integration by default. Login sources allow you to connect to external systems, such as vBulletin, LDAP, or virtually any other external source to authenticate your users.

You can configure your login sources by clicking its menu option under the Users menu. First, you choose which login sources are enabled by editing each one you want to use and checking its enabled status. Any login source considered to be enabled will be used to authenticate users. Once you do so, if you have more than one enabled, you can move it up or down the list by clicking the “up” or “down” links respectively on the list screen. The login source at the top represents the first source we’ll try to authenticate a user; the bottom one the last. We try each source until all of them report that they don’t know a user before we state that this user doesn’t exist.

Before you use a login source, you’ll need to edit each one to input the connection information, such as its database location.

For people adding new connections: The best way to get into creating connections is to look at an already-existing one that closely matches what you want to do. If your authentication system is another MySQL database, for example, then you might want to check out the vBulletin connection file. For more details on creating your own connection file click here for our documentation or contact support.

We will be adding a long list of external login source connection files for a number of products. If you have a specific product you are looking to integrate with - contact support and we can assist with creating an external login source connection file.

UPDATE: We have just added Joomla and PHPBB3 as external login sources.