[UPHPU] Automate third-party site login?

[Mac Newbold]

Today at 10:02am, Chris Wood said:

> I have an odd situation where I want to link from one site to a third-party
> site and automatically log the user in.  The other site is happy to let me
> do this if I can figure it out.  I tried talking them into providing access
> to the data on their site in other ways, but this is the only way they will
> do it due to getting burned in the past.
>
> The reason I want to link it this way is that I don't want to have to tell
> users what the username/password is for the site and then have to tell them
> again every time I change the password (which will happen as I gain/lose
> users).
>
> Is there any way to do this with PHP/javascript, etc?

There are a couple of possibilities I can think of:

1. Give them a link or button that sends the login credentials to the 
other site in a GET or POST. This will reveal the credentials to the user, 
if they look at your HTML source, so not a good idea if you want to keep 
them secret, like if they're shared among all users. If each user has 
their own credentials though, then you can make this work nicely. Just 
make sure that your "change password" feature updates the 3rd party site 
too, or at least warn them that if they change the other site's password 
without telling you, the single sign-on won't work.

2. You might be able to arrange a way to use curl or something to post the 
credentials to the 3rd party server before linking the user to it, but 
you'd need some way for the other server to know that it was the client 
that was authenticated, not your server. Probably needs some third party 
help.

With more information we might be able to toss out some other ideas or 
solutions.

Thanks,
Mac

--
Mac Newbold		MNE - Mac Newbold Enterprises, LLC
mac at macnewbold.com	http://www.macnewbold.com/