Create login page in your wordpress site

You can use wordpress admin login functionality for your own website login page. It will use your wordpress table wp_users to validate credentials. Advantage here is that you can manage users via wordpress admin.

If you are using a script outside your template, you should require wp-load.php so you can use its functionality.

require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );

If your login page is inside your template say you have your page-login.php, then you don't need to require wp-load.php coz it's included already upon loading the page.

Once you have that in place, you can now call the functionality to validate login credential. You just simply call the function user_pass_ok() with parameters: username and password.

Please see sample usage below, you can either use it via GET or POST method, depends on how you handle your login page.

$username = @$_POST['username'];
$password = @$_POST['password'];

if (user_pass_ok($username, $password)) {
    echo 'login success';
} else {
    echo 'login failed';
}

This is just a simple post but hope this helps in a way. Please leave a comment if you like this post.

Setting up a remember me functionality on your website

First we need to have a login page where to put the "remember me" check box to have an identifier whether the user wants to be remembered or not.

Second, we need to set the users table to store the remember me token which we will use to identify as to which user should be logged in.

Please take note that I used token which is another field rather than using the actual user id coz having a token that changes every time is much secure than having just a static id.

I will discuss below on how you can make it much secure.

Okay, once you have the above in placed, we are now ready to do the coding.

You need to capture those users that agrees to be remembered then call this function below. For the benefit of this post, I set the cookie to expire in 14 days.

<?php
 
if (!mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password')) die("can't connect to db: ".mysql_error());

if (!mysql_select_db('database_name')) die("can't select db: ".mysql_error);

$user_id = '<your login user id>';

// call this function to set cookie and expiry time
set_remember($user_id);

// set cookie and expiry time
function set_remember($user_id=0) {
        $token = md5($user_id."-".date('YmdGis'));
        $expire = time() + (14 * 86400); // 14 days

        setcookie("remember_me_token", $token, $expire);

        $expire = date('Y-m-d', $expire);
        $return = update_user_token($user_id, $token, $expire);
}

// update users table for token and expiry time
function update_user_token($user_id=0, $token='', $expire='') {
        $sql = "UPDATE user_table SET token='$token)', expire='$expire' ".
               "WHERE user_id='$user_id'";

        $query = mysql_query($sql);
        return 1;
}

?>

$user_id is the id of the user who successfully logged in to your site. This will be used to generate a random token which we will set in our cookie and update the users table as well.

We will use the function of the PHP to set the cookie.

setcookie("your_cookie_variable", "your_cookie_value", "expiration_of_cookie");

Please take note that you have to make sure that the user be able to login with the right credential before you call the function "set_remember($user_id)".

After calling function, you can get the cookie value by calling $_COOKIE["your_cookie_variable"]; and in our example above, you can call it by this syntax $_COOKIE['remember_me_token'];

I just want to remind you that COOKIE is not like a SESSION that starts when the pages loaded, the COOKIE will store value in your computer, so you need to come up with a COMPLEX name to prevent hackers from hacking your site.

Okay, moving on, since we set our cookie to expire in 14 days, then we have to make the user to be remembered every time they login and extend the expiration accordingly.

To do that, we need to get the token value from the cookie, get the user_id from our database, then call again the function set_remember($user_id);. If there's no cookie available, then redirect the user to login page.

Please see below for the sample implementation.

<?php

if (!mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password')) die("can't connect to db: ".mysql_error());

if (!mysql_select_db('database_name')) die("can't select db: ".mysql_error);

$cookie = get_cookie('remember_me_token');
if ($cookie) $user_id = get_user_id_by_cookie($cookie);

// go to login page if no value for user_id
if (!$user_id) header("http://mywebsite/user/login");

// function to get the user id from the cookie
function get_user_id_by_cookie($cookie='') {
        $sql = "SELECT user_id FROM user_table WHERE token='$cookie'";

        $query = mysql_query($sql);
        return mysql_result($query, 0, 0);
}

// call this function to renew token then set a new new expiry datetime
set_remember($user_id);

// set cookie and expiry time
function set_remember($user_id=0) {
        $token = md5($user_id."-".date('YmdGis'));
        $expire = time() + (14 * 86400); // 14 days

        setcookie("remember_me_token", $token, $expire);

        $expire = date('Y-m-d', $expire);
        $return = update_user_token($user_id, $token, $expire);
}

// update users table for token and expiry time
function update_user_token($user_id=0, $token='', $expire='') {
        $sql = "UPDATE user_table SET token='$token)', expire='$expire' ".
               "WHERE user_id='$user_id'";

        $query = mysql_query($sql);
        return 1;
}

?>


Hope this post helps a lot!! Thanks!!

Login to twitter via backend using PERL

This is the same from the last post - Login to foursquare via backend using PERL but this time, we're doing it for twitter. Just follow the 4 simple steps below.

1. Install the libraries into your server.

• LWP::UserAgent;
• HTTP::Cookies;

2. Initialize the libraries UserAgent and Cookies.

my $lwpua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

my $user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6";
my @header = ('Referer' => 'http://m.twitter.com',
             'User-Agent' => $user_agent);

my $cookie_file = "cookies.dat";
my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(
                file => $cookie_file,
                autosave => 1,
                ignore_discard => 1);

$lwpua->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

3. Post your username and password to https://mobile.twitter.com/session and save the cookies.

my $strUser = '<your twitter username>';
my $strPass = '<your twitter password>';

# log-in to twitter
$response = $lwpua->post('https://mobile.twitter.com/session',
                            ['username' => $strUser,
                             'password' => $strPass,
                             'authenticity_token' => $auth_token], @header);

$cookie_jar->extract_cookies( $response );
$cookie_jar->save;

4. You can check if successful or not by accessing https://mobile.twitter.com via GET and print the content.

$response = $lwpua->get('https://mobile.twitter.com', @header);
$form_data = $response->content;

print "$form_data\n\ndone!";


That's it! Please see the complete code below.

#!/usr/bin/perl

require LWP::UserAgent;

use strict;
use warnings;

use HTTP::Cookies;

my $lwpua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

my $user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6";
my @header = ('Referer' => 'http://m.twitter.com',
             'User-Agent' => $user_agent);

my $cookie_file = "cookies.dat";
my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(
                file => $cookie_file,
                autosave => 1,
                ignore_discard => 1);

$lwpua->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

# getting authenticity token
my $response = $lwpua->get('https://mobile.twitter.com/session/new', @header);
my $form_data = $response->content;

$form_data =~ s/\n//g;
$form_data =~ /input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="(.*?)"/ig;

my $auth_token = $1;

my $strUser = '<your twitter username>';
my $strPass = '<your twitter password>';

# log-in to twitter
$response = $lwpua->post('https://mobile.twitter.com/session',
                            ['username' => $strUser,
                             'password' => $strPass,
                             'authenticity_token' => $auth_token], @header);

$cookie_jar->extract_cookies( $response );
$cookie_jar->save;

$response = $lwpua->get('https://mobile.twitter.com', @header);
$form_data = $response->content;

print "$form_data\n\ndone!";


1;


Hope you like it!! Thank you for reading.

Login to foursquare via backend using PERL

This is just a simple login request to foursquare via backend using PERL. Just follow the simple steps and the complete code below.

1. Install the libraries needed.

• LWP::UserAgent;
• HTTP::Cookies;

2. Initialize UserAgent and Cookies.

my $lwpua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

my $user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6";
my @header = ('Referer' => 'http://foursquare.com',
             'User-Agent' => $user_agent);

my $cookie_file = "cookies.dat";
my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(
                file => $cookie_file,
                autosave => 1,
                ignore_discard => 1);

$lwpua->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

3. Post your username and password to https://foursquare.com/mobile/login and save the cookies.

my $strUser = "<your foursquare username>";
my $strPass = "<your foursquare password>";

# log-in to foursquare
my $response = $lwpua->post('https://foursquare.com/mobile/login',
                      ['username' => $strUser,
                       'password' => $strPass], @header);
$cookie_jar->extract_cookies( $response );
$cookie_jar->save;

4. You can check if successful or not by accessing http://foursquare.com/mobile/ via GET and print the content.

$response = $lwpua->get("http://foursquare.com/mobile/", @header);
my $form_data = $response->content;

print "$form_data\n\ndone!";


That's it! So simple right? Please see the complete code below.

#!/usr/bin/perl

require LWP::UserAgent;

use strict;
use warnings;

use HTTP::Cookies;

my $lwpua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

my $user_agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6";
my @header = ('Referer' => 'http://foursquare.com',
             'User-Agent' => $user_agent);

my $cookie_file = "cookies.dat";
my $cookie_jar = HTTP::Cookies->new(
                file => $cookie_file,
                autosave => 1,
                ignore_discard => 1);

$lwpua->cookie_jar($cookie_jar);

my $strUser = "<your foursquare username>";
my $strPass = "<your foursquare password>";

# log-in to foursquare
my $response = $lwpua->post('https://foursquare.com/mobile/login',
                      ['username' => $strUser,
                       'password' => $strPass], @header);
$cookie_jar->extract_cookies( $response );
$cookie_jar->save;

$response = $lwpua->get("http://foursquare.com/mobile/", @header);
my $form_data = $response->content;

print "$form_data\n\ndone!";


1;


Hope you like it!! Thank you for reading. Please see other post - Login to twitter via backend using PERL