Just curious if anyone has done anything like the following with EE?
I have a client where EE is used for a magazine publication. However, they now want to create a member’s area on this EE website, but the issue is that the membership data is contained on another system (MSSQL DB) they they use to admin day-to-day member needs in-house (it’s a non-profit). So it’s not a case of just doing an import and going from there.
So I need a way for a member to log into the EE site, and instead it checks against that external DB for validity. Basically just checking user/password and if their membership is active. Maybe their first name to personalize the site.
Should this just bypass all EE membership functions and be custom? I don’t need profiles etc…
Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Has anyone done anything in the realm?
It’s not a pleasant task dealing with two separate membership systems, but some have had success with aMember Pro. One user in Slack even mentioned possibly building a Zapier integration for it.
What we did, when we needed to use an outside DB as the master member source, is we created an add-on that:
You can still use additional member fields in EE for extra EE-specific reasons / data
There’s still the issue of how do people create / update the external DB, but for the purpose of this, let’s assume that already exists and works just fine and isn’t my problem 😊
Thanks for the replies, Derek and Hop Studios.
Hop Studios, the details you provided are helpful, and in comparing my requirements, they are actually less in that:
As to your last comment, it’s fully functioning Membership software the non-profit uses so maintaining that data is already done. It’s specialized to what they do, so they prefer to keep it rather than operate membership within EE.
It seems like a plugin, that doesn’t address/require the EE membership system would be the best route.
Thanks again. As I work through this, it seems less daunting then I initially thought.
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