The usual way to make things like this work is by having a standardised api. In the case of membership for a website, it might look something like:
get_unique_user_id # of logged in user get_username_for_id( id ) Then if a forum has tables such as: thread -> references username post -> ditto and maybe methods like send_pm( user ) find_posts( user ) if you are prepared to sacrifice the actual foreign key relationship, not that big a thing IMHO, you can do it all through the API. The person that writes the forum code/schema can actually have two install options - with and without the user table. Cat almost has this in place at present. -- There's an infinite supply of time, we just don't have it all yet. _______________________________________________ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/