Integrating CakePHP with bbPress – Part 2
This is the second of a 3 part tutorial on how to integrate bbPress with CakePHP 1.2.x. When complete, these 3 tutorials will accomplish:
- Integrating bbPress in a sub-folder (not a subdomain) of your cake install (part 1 here)
- Integrating user registration – when a user registers through your cake application they are automatically registered in bbPress.
- Integrating the login – when a user is logged in via the cake application they are automatically logged in in bbPress.
Part 2 – Integrating User Registration
This part is a little more tricky, but not unmanageable. The challenge here is that your Cake application probably uses the Auth component, or a custom user setup. So you probably have a prebuilt users table and chances are it does not conform to what bbPress is looking for in it’s users table. Also, the encryption scheme between the two is probably different.
With that in mind, I’ve made the following design decisions
- My Cake users schema will remain intact AND the bbPress users schema will remain intact.
- Users must register through my Cake application only
- CakePHP is using the built-in Auth component.
- When a user registers through my Cake application – I run the necessary logic from the Cake
Usermodel to update the bbPress users table. - The bbPress tables are in the same database as my CakePHP tables
- I change the encryption scheme of bbPress to conform to my Cake app.
Step 1: changing the bbPress password encryption.
If you’ve followed Part 1 of this tutorial, you’ve successfully installed and ran bbPress in a subfolder of your cakephp install. Navigate to that subfolder, then open following file: bb-includes/backpress/code.wp-pass.php
Notice two functions, hash_password(...) and check_password(...). We will overwrite these two functions to match the hashing that takes place in our CakePHP install. If, as I denoted above, you are using the built-in CakePHP Auth component, this is very simple – just comment out the existing functions and replace them with the following:
function hash_password($string) {
$string = 'YOUR CONFIGURE::SALT VALUE'.$string;
return sha1($string);
}
function check_password($password, $hash, $user_id = '') {
$string = 'YOUR CONFIGURE::SALT VALUE'.$password;
if(sha1($string) != $hash) {
return false;
} else {
return true;
}
}
Replace the YOUR CONFIGURE::SALT VALUE with the appropriate value from your CakePHP application. This can be found in app/config/core.php.
With these two functions in place, your bbPress user system should be hashing and checking the passwords the same way.
Step 2: Saving a bbPress user from the CakePHP install.
Fortunately, CakePHP provides an easy hook into the ORM saving process with the afterSave() model callback.
To get your User model to save a new bbPress user when a new Cake user is created, add the following functions to your User model script:
function afterSave($created)
{
if($created)
{
$sql = "INSERT INTO `bb_users`
(`user_login`, `user_pass`, `user_nicename`,
`user_email`, `user_url`, `user_registered`,
`user_status`, `display_name`)
VALUES(
'".$this->data['User']['username']."',
'".$this->data['User']['password']."',
'".$this->data['User']['username']."',
'".$this->data['User']['email']."',
'',
NOW(),
0, '".$user['User']['username']."')";
$this->query($sql);
}
}
Notice that we are just creating an SQL statement with all the necessary fields required to successfully insert the user into the bbPress system, and then executing that SQL. Also, if you are using the default functionality of the Auth component, $this->data['User']['password']; should automatically be hashed with the same scheme as Step 1.
Step 3 – Preventing registration from bbPress
This is the easy part. Simply add the following line to the top of your register.php script in you bbPress install and replace the path with the correct path to your cake registration page.
die(header('Location: /path/to/your/cake/registration/page'));
So, that’s it! Now, when you register a user through your Cake application, they should also appear in the bbPress users table, and you should be able to successfully log into both with the exact same credentials.
But, the plot thickens – we don’t want our users to have to log in to both the cake app and bbpress. We want them to be logged into both automatigically. Stay tuned for part 3 of this tutorial and I’ll attempt to tackle this very conundrum.
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Luke, 
Nice explanation. Simple and easy to follow.