joomla login system

Question

Hi all,i want to know more how does joomla does the authentication. Where should i look for the codes? thanks..

Answer 1

The Joomla Project is open source. As such the code is freely available for you to download and investigate. If you have any questions about it specifically, there are forums and mailing lists you can subscribe to and participate in. I'm sure the Joomla community would be better equipped to answer your question than SO.

Answer 2

Joomla uses a plugin architecture for authentication. It fires each plugin in order until one of them returns true. If all published authentication plugins return false, the authentication fails. A tutorial on creating authentication plugins for Joomla is available.

Answer 3

After downloading the sources at joomla.org, you can find the username-password-authentication functionality in the following files:

• /plugins/authentification/joomla.php - Backend and Frontend authentication
• /libraries/joomla/user/helper.php - Password generation / encryption

Authorization (Giving an authenticated user the rights he possesses) is implemented in:

• /libraries/joomla/user/authorization.php - JAuthorization() sets rights for different user levels (Registered, Author, Manager, Administrator ...)
• /libraries//phpgacl/gacl.php - PEAR ACL (mapping rights to database)
• /libraries//phpgacl/gacl_api.php - PEAR ACL (mapping rights to database)

(Be aware that the online version of these Joomla! files is 1.5.10, so not the newest one.)