dolphin as authentication for other platforms

I'm expanding my niche, and unfortunately this niche requires more robust forums than what dolphin will ever be able to offer.

I would still like to back-end this expansion with the dolphin profiles database, so my inquiry today is how difficult would it be?

Specifically - say I use a phpBB installation, and I want my dolphin profiles to be able to log into that installation with current credentials. What would this take? phpBB is just an example, it could be vanilla, vB or similar.

My site currently is "integrated" with phpbb3, that means that user who registered on either platform will be able to log in on both.

But the integration is not perfect though, it's through Iframe, not fully integrated like Orca. The width of the forum is not working correctly with the width of Dolphin. e.g. when people post a large picture it expand and part of the pic will be unseen, the text will be expanded and unseen as well. 

It's like a patch on the wound, I haven't seen a fully integrated phpbb3 (or any other forum platform) with Dolphin. 

oh, and Scriptlogistic did the integration for me, on both 7.09 and 7.1.4 , He's really good with database integration.

I've given up on a meshing of the platforms, or integration in the traditional sense.

I'm OK with the forums software being completely un-integrated as far as UX goes, even most of the session. All I'm looking for is the phpBB instance to be able to authenticate a user against the dolphin profile table and pull an avatar. If one forums platform is easier to do this with than another, I'm all ears.

Does phpbb3 uses CSS?  Can you control photo size using max-width?

Additional option - separate authentication from dolphin completely and use a difference source for both dolphin and forums authentication.

Basically what I'm getting at - there's a lot of value in building a members database, just like you would a mailing list. I want to build a central database through a multitude of facets, with the ability to scale into additional platforms as needed - all seamless to the end user.

not seen a full integration with other forums, although I think Deano came close with Vanilla forums a while ago, before 7.1 though I think. Might be worth giving him a shout, see if the project can be used for 7.1?

In order to accomplish this, you will need to hire a php/mysql developer that knows their stuff.  Most platforms are not designed for such integration.  We had someone to come into our CMS forum complaining how she could not integration some other platform with ours; we can not code integration for the huge number of applications out in the world.  There is no central way of handling  users.  The developer is going to have to study and learn each platform in order to have a single sign-on and be logged in and out of each platform automatically.  This has been discussed before and there is no out of the box solution.

What about something along the lines with Open ID? Since dolphin supports it natively right?

Looking into hosting my own (branded) open id platform:

http://janrain.com/products/identity-service/

http://openid.net/developers/

Or, since that is probably quite costly - 

https://wiki.phpbb.com/Authentication_plugins

 Forums are the hart of my current site. I have over 9500 topics with more than 260,000 replies and was wondering what you mean by "more robust forums than dolphin will ever be able to offer".

To me the main issue was the lack of pagination, but if there are other things I should watch out for, I'd like to hear.

I'm referring to native features of most forum implementations, top of the list is intuitive and familiar layout/use. Easy image upload/embed, category topic counts etc. Dolphin has made minor moves towards some of these features in the recent releases, but still much is lacking.

The layout is something you can change to your likings, if you don't like it. But even the reply link is in the same place as with phpbb.

I also don't see what TinyMCE doesn't do that these BB's do. They all use BB codes, which have the same limitations as TinyMCE. Actually TinyMCE does have some options to make this process user friendly. But as it currently stands, for both you need the URL to the image to use it.

Topic and post counts are also part of the Orca forums, so I still do not see the issue, other than personal preference.

I'm not saying it can't be done but you are trying to merge two systems that both rely on a certain table and fields structure in their core. This means you will have to find some way to synchronise both user tables or customise code so much that upgrading will become almost impossible.

I think you should decide for yourself what is more important. The functions that Dolphin offers, or that of some other software package that has better forums. I don't think you'll find anything out there that offers the functionality Dolphin offers and with some time and well choosen modules you can make it in to anything you like.

TinyMCE is great, if you're a blogger. Dolphin has the inherent problem of being able to do far too much and none of it perfectly. My desire to use a platform like phpBB or vB is that it's familiar to a large portion of users. Everything from creating a post to adding a reply & embedding images or video inline. You can argue that Dolphin can to that just as well, but I can argue that 95% of the visitors do not have the motivation to figure out how to use it. 

The truth is that Dolphin will likely never integrate well with any forum, even its own. It's a community platform with a focus on the user or profile and their relationship with others. With a forum, the focus is on the discussion - not the user, but the credibility of the user is still important (this is the only place I see Dolphin being able to mesh with a forum).

I am not looking for a UX integration. I am perfectly happy with my phpBB site being completely separate from my D7.1 site. The only thing I'm looking for is a shared Identity or Profile between the two. OpenID seems to be my solution, but it's far too much for one man to tackle on a whim.