Hi there,
I'm currently building a website which fetches youtube videos and flickr images and lets users comment on them on the website. While having it's own commenting system, the website also has an option to login with youtube/flickr to comment on youtube or flickr with their usernames.
I'm doing this by opening a popup window (real popup, not a jquery kind of popup), closing the popup after they login and storing their tokens in a PHP $_SESSION. Question is, I have quite a lot of stuff going on with jQuery and I'd like to let them switch between commenting as a visitor to the site to commenting on Flickr/YouTube after they login without refresh.
Basically, I'd need a way to detect when the pop-up closes so I could then make a request to a PHP file which would tell me if the user has a token saved in the $_SESSION or not and hide the name and email boxes from the comment form as they would only need the input box.
Another way would be to trigger a setInterval() when they open the popup and check for the $_SESSION every 2/3 seconds for example, but I don't think that's the best way to go. Ideally I'd want something that works as soon as the user closes the popup.
More details: I'm using http://swip.codylindley.com/popupWindowDemo.html to display the pop-ups The callback script for both functions does a self.close() after storing the token in a $_SESSION Users can be logged in with both Flickr and Youtube (but I don't think this matters anymore). Difference between commenting as a visitor and Flickr/Youtube user is that you have three fields (name, email, message) as a visitor and just one otherwise (message) I do a check when page loads, so if the user refreshes the page at this point, everything is ok, but I would like it if he didn't have to do that, or if at least it would refresh automatically.
Lastly, I'm good to go with other options, as long as the user doesn't have to leave the page, refresh himself to swap between visitor and logged in user. Using jQuery in the page so if it's a jQuery based solution, even better.
Sorry for the long post, couldn't find a way to make it shorter.
Thank you for the help guys!
EDIT
setInterval() with a function that calls a PHP script to check for the $_SESSION variable worked like a charm, not at all as bad on performance or user experience as I expected. Still, if anyone can think of a better solution I'm ready to accept it.
Thanks!