bbPress External Authentication Plugin

This week I will be finishing up a plugin for bbPress that replaces the default user system and allows bbPress to authenticate users based on a database table, either in the same database or in an external database. The plugin does not create users in bbPress, keeping user management simple by only having one database of members.

Features:

• Allows for connections using the bbPress installation’s database or to an external database
• Provides functionality to authenticate with phpass (bbPress, WordPress, PHPBB3 default), SHA1, MD5, and plain text passwords.
• Can be configured for single Full Name fields or split First Name/Last Name fields.
• Ability to set the default role of users.
• Disable/Enable user and administrator access to profile management functionality. Disabling this feature prevents users from modifying their data from within bbPress.
• Disable/Enable new user registration in bbPress. Disabling this features allows for providing a link to send users to your current registration page.

Limitations:

• Currently uses the bbPress database functionality, limiting connections to MySQL only.
• Does not use the bbPress users table at all. Current members will need to be created in the table specified in the plugin configuration. (I may, at some point, add functionality to automate this process, dependant on interest.)
• This plugin does not duplicate the single-signon functionality in the built-in WordPress Integration and although it’s possible that it would work for authentication-only instances, the built-in functionality would probably work better.