Expanding range of benefits to members

[bondibear]

Need advice:

Forums are a great way to get people involved in a community but sooner or later you want to incorporate other member benefits as well. These could include:

* Newsletters
* Discounts (for own products or with partner sites)
* Offer downloads for members.
* Asses to special "member only" content

If you were building a site and wanted to expand the services you are providing your members beyond just forums (i.e. post messages AND access all of the other benefits mentioned above), can anyone suggest ways of going about this? Is it possible to use username/passwords from a standard message board program to do all the other features as well?

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

[jkcity]

"Is it possible to use username/passwords from a standard message board program to do all the other features as well?"

yep thats the best way to go about it as you want full integration.

[dpickup]

You would definitely want to integrate any future membership functions with your established forum membership database. You don't want to make your members re-register repeatedly and need several accounts just to access the various features on your site.

[Matthew_Benstead]

That sounds like a good idea. Anyone know how to do this with Vbulletin??

[dpickup]

Originally posted by Matthew_Benstead
That sounds like a good idea. Anyone know how to do this with Vbulletin??

If you're looking for information on how to do this yourself then you would need to post on one of the programming forums here or at VBulletin.

However if you have a specific other script in mind that you want integrated with VB then you may want to approach the people behind the second script and see if they are able to integrate with VB for you. I know the software company I work for has made their scripts integratable with VB since it is a popular script amongst small businesses.