Best way to cross link members area?

i don't know, but i'll give ya a bump for a real buisness thread.

I would make the assumption it can be done via htaccess. The same way it is often done with plug ins.
Only assumining since I have never shared a members area.

possibly allow the other site in htaccess?

I believe you just make all your members areas share the same htpassword file

You can either use StrongBox or simply move all your members areas to one protected folder. IOW your different sites are all just tour pages and the login on all of them go to the central domain where all your members areas are.

centraldomain.com/secure/firstsitemembersarea
centraldomain.com/secure/2ndsitemembersarea etc etc

Yes, I am interested in this question too, this answer makes sense.

it's also makes life easier when ftp'ng new updates to your site because it's all on one domain.

Seems like the best idea

yep the most logical way to do it... have all your content on the one domain, and then setup your individual members areas to run off that content depending on the site.

AWIZ have got a nice script to handle a setup such as this

Couple of ways to do it, depending on your setup and how you have your authentication running now ... good suggestions here so far.

We've always stored all of our content on a central domain, and used htaccess to authenticate individual members areas ... recently we merged our celeb sites into the purve members area so purve members could access both but not vice versa.

To do this we wanted to really push the fact that there was 2 members areas available with the 1 password, so we created new front pages inside the Purve.com members area that has screenshots of the 2 members areas and 'click to login' to each ...

We deliberately left it so that the user has to login to each one, as making a user login makes them feel like they got something of bonus value. When the account is created we add the password to both sites password files.

We also considered actually making the surfer manually setup their second password - ie, join site 1 as normal with 'to activate your bonus site membership select your user/pass here' which then adds it to the password file.

Good luck ;-)

This is pretty much the way we have it now but we don't like it like this. Members have to login to another domain other than they signed up for and some definetly don't like it or get confused and feel like they are being ripped off in some way because they are not logging into the site they signed up for.

Mark

Mark I have had mine like this for a very long time and never had one complaint. The bonus page on our tours reflect an all in one membership and that's probably why we have never had any issues.

I guess that makes sense, we don't have our tours setup that way though.

Mark

anyone have the url for the StrongBox software?

Thanks,
Mark

That's what I do on a bunch. Works well.

Well the way i would do this is to make a new dir format for the main sites. Ex:
home
-domain1.com
--members
-domain2.com
--members
-membersarea

Now with this you would have to link the members folder in each domain to the membersarea folder in your root. In both domains you would set it so htaccess get written to the membersarea folder, so when a user access's one members folder, he can access the second one with the same username/password, but if he doesn't close the session he should be able to move from one members area to another without relogging in. This is good if you want a centralized members area sharing the same content, but if you have 2 different members areas you want to share you would need to do something different.

In that case you would need to use some custom scripting on creating user group htpasswd files and using it with the different members areas. This would really take a long time and a lot of scripting would be needed. The easiest way for this type would be to have your scripts write either to both htpasswd files, or both domains write to the same one and share them for the members area, but then you would have to make sure that usernames are unique so they dont overwrite each other.

All depends on how much time you want to spend on something like this and if your server and current scripts can handle this type of change.

Mark hit Ray up on ICQ 7208627