Integrating Membership and Profile with POP Forums

Now that I'm finally getting more comfortable with VS 2005, I think I'm going to start writing some code for POP Forums v8. I'm in a funny place though regarding the membership system I already have.

I have a People class that is more or less a container for rows in the forum's member table. It has properties that match like Name, Email, etc. My Global class does the plumbing you've seen elsewhere to associate roles with the logged-in user by creating a new Principal object and blasting it to the user.

Now, in ASP.NET v2, we have the Membership and Profile API's that make dealing with this kind of data super cool. Since it has always been my goal for the forums to act as the base for all kinds of user stuff, in the forum and elsewhere in the user's app, I'd like to continue that, even if Microsoft will now provide it.

So the question is, do I leave this stuff “as is,” or do I write my own providers so the developer can use Membership and Profile as if it were their own? Leaving things “as is” means the dev can add whatever they want without impacting the forum, but then they're using two separate API's. On the other hand, using an alternate provider that hooks into the forum framework then makes it a little harder to alter it.

What would you do?

 

1 Comment

  • Personally, I would leave it as is, even if that meant that it was not a standard API. Too often I find that being locked into someone else's idea of how to code something just doesn't suffice. In fact, that has been my biggest block to finally learning VB - that I prefer to just build everything that I can by hand.

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