vbDrupal is the Drupal fork project that combines the content management of Drupal with one of the best community forums-- vBulletin. In this article we will explore how vbDrupal
preserves all the independent permission and access controls of both
Drupal and vBulletin while adding a way to bind permission roles
together. Exercise care to keep exact control of your website.

Note: This article assumes that you understand and can implement:

1. Usergroups in vBulletin and roles in Drupal

2. Be able to set/edit their permissions and access controls

In vbDrupal, the ability to associate vBulletin usergroups to specific Drupal roles enhances the functionality
of the two systems. At the time of this writing, this association only
points in one direction, from vBulletin to Drupal. A vBulletin
usergroup can imply a Drupal role, but not vise-versa.

Administration Settings:

The first user labeled userid 1,
will be the system administrator. It will have all access abilities
throughout the Drupal and vBulletin areas. Any members of the Administrators usergroup, id 6,
will have full access to the Drupal area, as well. The system
administrator must be available or at least one person must be a member
of the Administrators usergroup to set up the Drupal area initially.

Configuration:

Create the vBulletin usergroups
that you desire, and any additional Drupal roles that you may need. You
can of course create new roles and usergroups at any time.

As an example, we have created a new role called blogger and have given that role the ability to make blog entries in Drupal.

In the past to give users this Drupal role, we would have to edit each Drupal profile for all users we would want to include.

With vbDrupal, we can go to the admin/access/roles page and edit the desired role for updating. All the defined vBulletin usergroups will be displayed, as shown below.

In this example, we have used vbDrupal to associate the Administrators, SuperModerators and Moderators usergroups with the blogger role. Note that we can imply multiple usergroups to any particular role.

All users in Administrators, SuperModerators and Moderators
usergroups are now automatically included in this Drupal role. Now when
we go to a particular user who is in one of those usergroups we will
see that the blogger role is implied.

Using
vbDrupal in this fashion, you can set up your site so you only need to
manage the usergroups in vBulletin with the Drupal roles. Permissions
automatically update for the users!

Of course, if you want to include others into the blogger role, you can manually add them by editing their profile, without including them into any of the above vBulletin usergroups.

One
exciting way to automatically enable more access is to link Drupal
roles with more privileges in with the vBulletin usergroups that are
associated in the ‘Promotions’ system in vBulletin . Thus, when someone is promoted (due to post count, reputation
level or some other criteria) they are automatically given more access
and privileges in the Drupal portion of your site. Likewise, if they
are demoted, they are automatically stripped of privileged access.