Using the qa_users table of the main forum in a second forum

Question

Next to my main site I plan to create another forum with another purpose (thus on another domain!).

I want the users from my main site to log-in into the new forum site - with their existing logins.

I found https://github.com/q2a/question2answer/blob/dev/qa-external-example/qa-external-users.php which seems quite complicated at first glance.

Questions:

1. Is there any easy way to just tell q2a to use the other database's qa_users table instead?

2. Has somebody done something like this already? If so, what would be the code of qa-external-users.php?

3. What else to consider?

Thanks for sharing your experiences and ideas.

Kai

Comments

Are both sites on the same server? Do they share the same database (with different prefix) or are they separate databases?

Answer 1

Kai, I did this before and it is working fine. see below thread.

http://question2answer.org/qa/56605/q2a-on-main-and-subdomain-with-single-user-base?show=56652#a56652

Comments

Thanks, I missed that one!

So the solution is to use the same database, having each q2a installation with different prefixes (why I didn't think of this!). And having the same prefix for the users table, i. e. "qa_users".

Great to hear that the session sharing for the login works with your subdomains! In my case I have two different domains, so this will not work, to my knowledge. However, I think it's okay to ask my users to login at site B again :)

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It should work for different domains also, provided they are on same server and accessing same mysql db.

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It would be nice but I guess, they need to have the same session folder. Basically "You cannot set cookies for another domain." - https://stackoverflow.com/q/6761415/1066234 I need more testing to find out what define('QA_COOKIE_DOMAIN', '.myq2asite.com'); can do. Maybe there is some workaround...

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I checked for subdomains but not for diff sites. Let us know the problems you see for diff domains.