Integrate Kitab Al Shifa's sessions into EML/Joomla's

[Tarek Loubani]

Currently, logins must happen twice - once against the Joomla codebase, and once against the Kitab codebase. Though they share the same user/password tables, they do not share session data.

The best way to integrate would be to extend the Authentication component of Kitab Al Shifa to use the Joomla framework API. Custom session code from the Kitab Al Shifa side that manipulates the Joomla sessions table is a non-option here, since it would be remarkably difficult, is not really necessary, and would require vigorous updating.

[Tarek Loubani (tareko)]

Reported upstream: https://github.com/tareko/Kitab-Al-Shifa/issues/28

[Andrew Jones (jonesmd)]

You describe essentially what sounds like a "bridge" - there are tonnes of them out there for various things (vBulletin, phpBB, MediaWiki etc). Having used a few over years, I found they were all a bit "fiddly" and never quite worked properly in all settings.

Am I wrong in my assumption?

One of the reasons I wanted to make the change from vB to Kunena was its tight integration with the joomla dB/authentication/users. Any chance of "componentizing" Kitab so that it runs from "within" Joomla rather than as a separate app? I know there are a few apps out there like that (g2 - a photo gallery app - is the only one I can think of off hand).

[Tarek Loubani (tareko)]

You are right on all counts. The goal of this ticket will be to implement a component (read: module) to authenticate people / sessions, perhaps even the various permissions, against the Joomla framework using its API. Thanks for the list of apps that do this. I suspect at least one of them uses APIs to do all this instead of horrendously finicky direct writes to the tables..