Portal?! Allow user logon to my website...

[darkside]

Hey,

I have been looking at the idea of adding user log-in to the site so I can do all sorts of things such as:
- greet users on the main site
- display news articles in advance to registered users
- allow registered users the chance to suppress banner ads
- only allow guests to view 10 pages per session before 'lockdown'

Since my site uses SMF, I am sure there are lots of elements that I can use, namely the user login function to allow me to identify users and let them change their options via another table on the site.

First steps first - can anyone give me some pointers on how to integrate the forum login and apply it to my site?

TIA!

[Ben_S]

Just use SSI.php

[darkside]

Cheers - I checked it out but couldn't figure out how that handles log-in to the site!

Ultimately, I would like to have a table containing user preferences for the site (such as alternate templates, advertising off, new article notification on) that would be set by a user and stored against their profile.

I guess I can do my requests

- display news articles in advance to registered users
- only allow guests to view 10 pages per session before 'lockdown'

by something simple like

Code Select Expand


if (!$context['user']['name']) {
show all current articles
} else
// user must be a guest
{
- don't show anything added in the last week
- start couting page views until 10 then ask users to register!
}


Does that make sense?

[[Unknown]]

You'll want to look into session variables and the like; they're part of what you'll need.

Theme options can actually be used this way, but there's currently... not a *ton* of documentation on how to do them from SSI.

-[Unknown]

[darkside]

Thanks.

I seem to have it working to my satisfaction.  I guess it's a faily low level check and not secure so as long as I don't make any security specific elements subject to the checks, I think I am cooking.

Code Select Expand


// include SMF SSI
require_once('../forum/SSI.php');

//check if the user is a guest or not
if ($context['user']['is_guest']) {
do some guesty stuff like limit the number of clicks they can make and stop them accessing the latest two articles
} else {
this is probably a user  :), or a reasonable hacker  ::), so just let them click through the site and view the lastest bits!
}


Pretty basic but it's added a whole dimension to the site for me and actaully incentivised sign up, which was my goal.

I have also added the simple check

Code Select Expand

if ($context['user']['name']=="MyUserName") {
show some specific stuff for me
make sure it's fairly innocent, like time to create page, page hits, user rating on that article and simple 'private' stats
}


Job's a good 'un!

Any comments?

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