Sorry for not being clear. Our professional asociation has an existing membership database that is maintained completely independently, as part of our association's main site. What we might want to do is to import part of the record for each member to the database on our forums site (into mysql, in particular). Then, when anybody registered for our forums, we would request certain information of them that we would then want to check against our imported database for authentication to complete the registration.
(Alternatively, we could try to make a check against the database on the main site, but this sounds like a programming and security nightmare!)
I hope that makes our potential need clear. (This would only be necessary if people who aren't membes started intervening in our forums in a destructive way...we're a bit worried because some of the technecal topics we might be discussing have important political ramifications, so outsiders might want to mess things up.)
Thanks - Tony
