Combining Login Database

[bottyz]

Hi all,

I'm redesigning my work's website, which is currently two separate sites as such. The main part being a website with a login area to allow customers to login for support (drivers FAQs videos etc on equipment we sell) and the other part being a zencart shop.
At the moment if a customer wants to login on the support area they need to register their email, inform us what equipment they have, etc... and a password which is stored in a mysql db separate to zen cart. And then if they wish to buy online they need to register again on the cart.

I want to make it so that when they register they can use one registration for both shopping and our support area. I am thinking about integrating zen cart into the main site a bit more but using a custom html 5 template that is more similar to the main site.

What I want to know is this... has anyone attempted something like this before? If so, how did you go about doing so? If not, is it even theoretically possible? I don't think it would be a great idea to build the whole site off of the zen cart shop as I've no experience with all the addons which allow custom urls, etc... And I'm trying to keep the urls similar to their current state. Another reason is because of the driver downloads / video support area.

I was thinking that I could somehow use the registration form from zen cart to action any registrations, then add a bit of custom code within this to add some info into a separate mysql database to allow for our support area interaction. Then when a customer goes to login, I'll also add some custom code to extract access info and such from our database at the same time so they can navigate the whole site without the need to sign up twice.

Where would be the best place to start? And where should I add my code do you think?
I'll also need to somehow combine data from the 5000 odd customers currently signed up on the separate databases. I was thinking that once the site is live, the next time they login with their old password they would need to update their details using the zen cart registration page.

Any help, suggestions or otherwise, always welcome and appreciated.

[stevesh]

You might look at what lat9 did here for ideas:

https://www.zen-cart.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=1597