Integrate CS into a Social networking site?

But I am an ASP.net developer but haven't used some of the methods that CS uses.
 I'm starting to wonder if CS is too much for me to handle.  Here are my
questions

I am trying to develop a social network using CS as the forums/blogs/messaging.
I already have most of the site done I just need a forum and figure it was
easier to buy then develop. So

1.      How hard is it to hang the other pages of my site off of CS.  I was
thinking about just using CS to handle all the USER stuff.

 

2.      How hard is it to create other pages?  It seems like CS won't
acknowledge other pages unless they are logged in the CS DB.  Is this right?

 

3.      Does CS use some sort of URL interpretation so that I have to make any
of the other pages I develop known to CS.  How does this URL interpretation
work?

 

4.      What exactly do I need to do to integrate a site I have created with CS
membership?

 

Hopefully these questions weren’t to broad but I’m  just trying to decide if
going with community server is a good idea or if I’m trying to do things the
structure wasn’t really intended for.  I have read all of Keyvan Nayyeri's Dev
Posts which are great but I still had these lingering questions and was
wondering if anyone knew the anwser.


 

Thanks,

John

Hi John,

     I'm pretty new to CS myself but I think a lot of people are interested in
this topic on the more general level of:  How to I integrate an existing website
with my own user database with CS?  It looks like you have a couple of options. 
The easy way is:  Buy a license for CS and also buy the Add-On for single sign
on using ASP.NET and cookies.  It's available through the official website and I
think combined you're looking at about $500 in licensing costs, which is easily
worth it if you think about how much time you're saving.  I've been reading
about it.  It looks like what you do is you install the new single sign on
module and configure an XML file.  Then you have people sign on using your web
site.  Once they sign onto your website, you give them a cookie.  The XML file
you configured tells CS what to look for in your cookie.  When they get to the
CS section of your site by following a hyperlink, or through an embedded i-frame
or div tag, CS reads the data out of the cookie and logs the user in.  You have
to put enough information into the cookie that CS can actually create the new
user account for you.  That gets you started.

     However, there are still a couple of holes to fill in:

     1. CS Sign Up link - If  users register with CS through the CS sign up link
(for example, they follow a hyperlink or Search Engine result directly to the CS
portion of your site and so they don't get the cookie) then the users don't end
up in your database.  I'm looking for more info on this but I'm guessing that
part of the single sign on kit probably allows you to redirect the sign up link
to a registration page on your site.  Otherwise you'll have to hack the code in
the sign up page to drop a record in your database also, or modify the code to
redirect to your page to sign up.

     2. Change of user information.  You want to keep your user records in sync
between your database and CS.  It doesn't look like there is any way to
associate a permanent key between your database and CS.  For example, CS uses
that cookie to create the user record for you based on email address and
password.  However, if someone signs into your system, changes their e-mail, and
goes to CS, you'll get a second record created in CS. CS doesn't know that they
changed their address, and now you lose all of their linkage to private
messages, posting history, preferences, etc.  On the other hand, if CS allowed
you to pass your own user defined key, such as a guid, this would be less of a
problem (but still a problem).

 
    I think what it comes down to is you have to buy the single sign on module
to get yourself 85% of the way there.  Then after that I think you need to hack
a little bit of code into your website to leverage the CS objects from the SDK,
so that if the user modifies their email address you can let CS know about the
change.  You'll also need to make sure that in CS the user can't make any
changes to e-mail address or any other data for which your application is the
system of record.

 
David