Home> Life with the Preacher > Remote Forums and Authentication (PHP and Webservices)

In an article at phpPatterns on designing classes in PHP, Harry Fuecks begins a rant on the current limitation of forum software, and some features he'd like to see implemented. He had some very cool idea's that I thought deemed worthy to share and let you imagine the possiblities.

In "Guidelines for Designing Classes in PHP" at phpPatterns Harry wrote,

As an aside, another area that it seems the current generation of PHP forum applications will probably miss out on, hampered by current design issues, is taking advantage of web services. Imagine if we could provide a client which would allow a remote web site to co-host part of the forum we run on our own site? All authentication, logic, queries etc. is still handled by our site but forum members can access the user interface from a completely remote web site.

And what if PHP forums could use distributed authentication? When you consider the sheer number of people signed up to a version of vBulletin or phpBB on the entire Internet, the opportunity is there to build an authentication system where users can login to other boards using an account they created on another website. If this took a distributed form (i.e. no single site "owns" all the user accounts) and some kind of "trust" system was evolved, we'd be talking about something which completely dissolves the need for "corporate owned" system like Passport and Liberty.