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Drupal and phpBB integration and merging their existing accounts

So, I've been seriously looking into what it will take to get phpBB and Drupal integrated.

Single Sign On Solutions

The main reason we want this would be so users only experience one login for the site.

There are several ways we can accomplish this. LDAP or Drupal phpBB module.

LDAP

LDAP will let users sign into either drupal or phpbb with one login.

Pros:

  • Single login account.
  • Future web applications can use LDAP too.
  • Drupal password hashes are in MD5 so we can import them into LDAP.
  • Drupal is pretty good about updating and creating LDAP accounts.

Cons:

  • Sessions aren't shared so users will have to login twice; once for the site and once for the forum.
  • PhpBB3 uses their own password hash so we can't import them into LDAP.
  • PhpBB3 can't create or edit LDAP accounts. If a user tries to create an account through PhpBB3 or modify their account password this is an issue. I think these things can be disabled though.

Drupal LDAP modules:
http://drupal.org/project/ldap_integration
http://drupal.org/project/ldap_provisioning | This is so users can create LDAP accounts using Drupal

phpBB Drupal Module

The PhpBB Drupal module works to handle user- and session-management for phpBB. It essentially works by taking things from the Drupal database and updating the PhpBB database each time a user logs in.

Pros:

  • Effectively acts as a single login account between Drupal and phpBB
  • Sessions are shared. User only needs to login once (through Drupal) to access the forum.
  • Provides a block that lists recent topics from the forum that can be placed somewhere in Drupal.

Cons:

  • Only works between Drupal and phpBB. This is fine if those are the only two web apps.
  • I don't think it can migrate phpBB accounts back into Drupal. This issue is similar to LDAP but it might be possible to work around this by creating Drupal users that link to their phpBB accounts and force everyone to reset their passwords next time they visit.

More info on the Drupal phpBB module:
http://drupal.i1media.no/drupal+phpbb
http://drupal.org/project/phpbb

Solving Account Migration/Merging between Drupal and phpBB

So I haven't found a good solution that's already documented about how to merge Drupal and phpBB users that already exist.

Here is my idea of a solution to this problem using both LDAP and the phpBB module:

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