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.

[dc3dreamer]

Just one bump... does anyone have any thoughts on this one? I just need pointers. I'll do the grunt work. I won't bump this again.

[dc3dreamer]

Well, I did it! HTTP-Authenticated RSS feed. It works just great with FeedDemon and any other aggregator that supports this RSS feature (I had to dig to find out it has come into use in the last couple of years).

The new feed generator page (external2.php) always requires HTTP username and password authentication. In the aggregator, you do this once each time you start it (same as a browser). The username and password is the same as the one you use to log into VB. And it took just a handful of lines in external.php. The U/P is passed to validate_authentication(), the user's forumperms rebuilt and boingo!, the rest of it just works. I'm a total PHP newbie so this was a great learner for me.

Not ready for release... I want to make this a plugin for the regular external.php, where you can specify something like auth=1 in the query string to get the authenticated feed. without it you would get the current unregistered-user feed. Now I gotta learn to make a plugin! This was fun.

[HolyKiller]

Exactly my case. Any detailed "howto" somewhere around ?