How can I integrate users' logins from my site into phpBB?

Question

Hello all,

I need some help with what is probably a newbie question in terms of modifying phpBB.

I have a whole system developed in PHP, and I would like to integrate phpBB so that people can navigate into the forums and post seamlessly, without logging in again.

Now, using the phpBB users table as the users table for my system (and having people register in phpBB instead of in my website) is not possible unfortunately (it'd take more work to redo our system than to build our own basic forum).
I'm assuming I can hack my way into making phpBB believe that a certain user ID has logged in, however, that user won't exist in phpBB's users table (which I'm assuming will cause it to error out pretty much everywhere).

All the tutorials and forum posts I could find implied having phpBB as the primary. I couldn't find anything to do it the other way around.

I'm guessing the only possible way to solve this is by having both tables relatively synchronized.

Now, provided that I can have both users table synchronized, what is the best way to integrate both sites, keeping my site's login and users table as the "primary" ones?
Also, is there anything in particular I should keep in mind when creating records in phpBB's users table? Or is it relatively straightforward to figure out? What tables should I be writing to, if there is more than one?

Answer 1

I have integrated phpBB with a site before, however I used phpBB's login system/users table as the primary one as you said. Since phpBB is a pretty advanced forum software, it would be a pretty time consuming project to change its user and login system completely.

When I had to use the site's login as the primary one, I used PunBB. It was way simpler to modify PunBB.

If you absolutely have to use your own login as primary, and phpBB, then I agree with you in that the easiest way would be to keep the tables synchronized, and call both the login scripts when somebody logs in.

When you're inserting data into phpBB, the users table is pretty straightforward. Each entry has the basic info for a user, and if you have custom fields for the user profiles, they go into the profile_fields and profile_fields_data tables.

One tricky thing is how phpBB encrypts user passwords. I think you have to use phpBB's function called phpbb_hash($password) to do that. It's declared in the file phpbb/includes/functions.php

For the phpBB login code, see funciton login_box in file phpbb/includes/functions.php

Answer 2

You can use the below to login into phpBB:

$result=$auth->login($username, $password);

if ($result['status'] == LOGIN_SUCCESS) {

echo "You're logged in";

} else {

echo $user->lang[$result['error_msg']];

}

Answer 3

I just worked on this task today, after some investigation implemented an Authentication plugin Here is a good example Getting phpBB to accept Django sessions

Answer 4

This is an old question so I'm sure you've worked something out by now, but if you need to refactor things in the future, this is entirely possible with authentication plugins in phpBB3:

http://wiki.phpbb.com/Authentication_plugins

I'm working on one now where phpBB is the "secondary" system, and it's going pretty well.