The Overclocked Too many questions, all the right answers.

I apologize for not getting a post up sooner, I have been extremely swamped with school work this past week. Even though I have not got a post up, rest assured I have been working on Drupaltin every spare minute I have got.

At the beginning of the week I put in about 10 hours of work on it. I had another idea which I was not sure if it would work but I wanted to play around and see what I could find. After some hours of trial and error and research and help in IRC and google and the php manuals, it was nothing but a failure. Unfortunately that was a few hours basically lost, but what can you do.

After that I just kept plugging along with my current plan and everything has been going really smooth ever since. This afternoon I finished up the profile work in the Drupal module which I am really happy with how it turned out. Users can now edit their profile in Drupal and it will sync everything up with vBulletin so it won't matter if they edit their profile in Drupal or vBulletin. It sounds really simple on paper, but there is actually quite a bit of work involved. If you allow users to change their username, when they try to change their username it will check the vBulletin database to make sure it doesn't exist. If your databases are synced up, you shouldn't have any problems. But as an added security measure I made it check first just in case. The passwords are a little bit tricky from a coding standpoint since Drupal stores passwords in plain md5, while vBulletin uses md5 and something called "salt" to create a very secure password hash. In order for the password to work in vBulletin after the user changes it in Drupal, the password must be encrypted correctly. Thankfully I had no troubles adding this in, so now all the passwords will sync without any problems. Another cool feature I added is when a user changes his username or password in Drupal, it will automatically fix the cookies so the user will stay logged in. Without this extra feature, the user would have to log in again at vBulletin with the new username and/or password since the cookie would be off.

I have only mentioned a few of the many advances I have recently made on the upcoming Drupaltin module. I have been trying to support the alpha release as much as I can in the support forums, but ultimately I feel it is best to focus most of my attention on finishing the new release. I am truly sorry if anyone feels slighted by this act, but since the first version is an alpha I feel it is best to not waste much time on fixing it as the new version will clear those bugs up. Please don't get me wrong though, I really appreciate reports on any bugs found because I can now assure those bugs are fixed for the stable release.