You might think this is another question about integrating bbPress with WordPress, but it’s not! I’m building a new website, and I would like to use bbPress as the support forums for it. The website has it’s own users table and stores the usernames as a varchar(255) and the passwords as varchar (255). All passwords are stored as sha1 hash. Basically what I want to do is to only have one place to login, that being on the main site, when the login is successful it’ll also set a cookie so the user may also use the bbPress forums. I would also like to use the avatar people upload to that site for the avatars on the forum. So here’s a few questions:

1. Is this even possible to set the cookie for bbPress from the login outside of bbPress?

2. Where should I start looking or poking?

3. For the avatars where should I start looking?

Thank you very much and if you need more information about my setup, please ask!!

[@johnhiler Member 15 years, 9 months ago]

It’s definitely possible to integrate bbPress with outside authentication systems!

There are some great posts about it here… it mentions that there are four places to tie into bbPress’s auth:

https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/integration-with-non-wp-software

What bulletin board system are you using? Maybe you could write a bbPress plugin to call your outside avatars inside of bbPress…

[@jimmyvt Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

Hi johnhiler,

I’m actually integrating it into a website, so when users login there they’ll also be logged into bbPress so they can post there as well, I would think it’d be easy to get avatars work, but I really have no idea. I shall read the link you’ve posted!

I’ll definitely share results too.

Thanks!!

[@jimmyvt Participant 15 years, 8 months ago]

Alright, so good news, it’s all working. I actually ended up including bb-load into my sites login script, then calling the login function when a successful login happened on my site, this then set cookies for my site and bbPress. I also have it so that when a successful registration takes place on my site it also inserts the user into the bbPress users database with the proper information. I snagged the MD5 password plugin for bbPress, modified it to change passwords to sha1 (which is also what my site uses).

Then I snagged the freshly baked cookies plugin for bbpress so that it also sets WordPress cookies. I got the external DB auth plugin for WordPress so that it uses the bbPress users table for authentication. I’ve killed registrations through WordPress and bbPress…so you can only register through my site. So now it works that a user registers and logs in through my site, and when they have a successful login they can use my site and WordPress and bbPress.

Thanks for the help!