Cookie path and domain

Depending on your site layout you might need to change the cookies settings within vBulletin. This page will guide you to the settings you'll have to make.

Example layouts

Below are a couple of example site layouts:

Layout 1

vBulletin location: http://example.org/forum
vbDrupal location: http://example.org/forum/drupal

No changed will have to be made, this set up should work out of the box.

Layout 2

vBulletin location: http://example.org/forum
vbDrupal location: http://example.org/

This setup is similar to the vbdrupal.org setup. For this to work properly you might need to change the cookie path setting. The cookie path must /. The cookie domain doesn't need to be adjusted

Layout 3

vBulletin location: http://forum.example.org/
vbDrupal location: http://example.org/

In this case the forum and drupal run on different hostname. Mostlikely you will have to adjust the cookie domain value. In this case the value must be .example.org (note the leading dot). You might also need to adjust the cookie path, it must be /.


Layout 4

vBulletin location
http://example.com/
vbDrupal location
http://example.org/

Completely different domains. This setup prevents sharing of cookies, thus single sign-on is not available.
Starting from vbDrupal 5.2.1 it is possible to use a setup like this. To enable cross domain authentication you will need to add a configuration directive to the settings.php. See the settings.php or default.settings.php file for further instructions. There are a few limitations to this setup:

Only works on browsers with cookies enabled
No single sign-on
You can not use the login form on the vBulletin navbar; either use a different Drupal theme or change the vBulletin navbar.


How to change these settings
The cookie settings can be found in the vBulletin admin control panel. It's one of the various settings you can change from the "vBulletin Options" page.
Concerns with changing cookies settings
When you change cookie settings (path or domain) you need to invalidate the old cookies before everything will work. After you change the cookie settings you will mostlikely not be able to log out through vBulletin. this is because the cookie settings send to the browser do not match the currently stored cookies.
There are a couple of ways to kill these stale cookies. On way is to remove the cookies from your browser. This option might not be available to all browsers.
Another way is to wait until the cookies have been expired. However this could take a long while.
The best way would be to user a cookie kill script that removed the stale cookies based on the old settings. A script like this is available from the vbDrupal CVS. You will have to edit that script to reflect the old settings and let users visit the script in one way or the other. One way would be simply to point the users to that script through a link. A nicer, and transparent method, would be to include this script in vBulletin. When users visit vBulletin again their old cookies will be automatically killed. A method to include this script in vBulletin would be to place it in the includes directory of vBulletin and add the following line to the config.php file:
@include_once('includes/kill_stale_cookies.php');
Note: if you screw up the configuration you might not be able to log in while this script is still being included.