Authentication API
 

I know this has been suggested in many forms (openid, LDAP, ), but as a more generic thing it would be great if vBulletin had more accessable backend for authentication & registration of users.

I've tried many times to get vBulletin to play nice with 3rd party software so my site could have a single signin but it always ends up as a hair pulling excercise.

At the moment there seems to be two ways of going about this:

1. Including global.php and accessing vBulletins native classes.

   Pros: Very little effort required.

   Cons: vBulletin is picky about location, making including these files outside its base path difficult. Quite a large amount of functions/librarys and classes get included with these files, sometimes clashing with 3rd party namespaces or PHP environment settings.

2. Using hooks.

   Pros: No need to worry about core files or includes.

   Cons: Still same issue getting 3rd party software to play nice within vBulletins' environment, unless you roll your own code to deal with 3rd party database & authentication, can be a big undertaking.

I geuss I would like to maybe even see some kind of plugin system for authentication where you could swap out vbulletins' auth system for a 3rd party, alternately just make vbulletins authentication more abstract (or at least a dedicated API) so that it can be dropped into 3rd party code easier.