Help adding feature to RSS feeds (DONE!)

[dc3dreamer]

Hi - I'm a bit familiar with PHP - mainly worked in ASP in the past, but I know zillions of languages - so this is a request only for guidance.

I want to make RSS feeds available for non-guest forums. My plan is to have the External.php page look at the HTTP request's Authentication: header and use that username/password to authenticate the feed request against the VB user database. This means I need to get to the decoded HTTP username/password via PHP call (it's in Base64 in the header itself), then validate those credentials aginst the VB userbase. If they validate, I then need to bounce that against the user's groups and the forum permissions, and feed only what that user is authorized to view. I think I can generate Authentication in the RSS request by using a URL of the form userass@domain. I still have to test some aggregators to see if they support that URL format and generate the HTTp Autheitication header in their requests. If that's not the case, I think I'm dead in the water...

Not knowing much about VB, this could be a bit daunting, but it would really help my users who are email-guys (we just switched away fromYahoo groups). I'd like to offer them feeds of closed groups.

Can someone give me just a few pearls? I'll do the grunt work. It'll be fun.