I don't really understand what this one does.  Can someone explain it better?

hey craig - it's a wierd one.  in a nutshell, it checks to make sure a user is logged into eblah.  this is useful if a section of your website (which is not part of E-Blah) requires authentication.  

for example: you write a script that is NOT part of eblah and not a mod to eblah, but you only want registered users to access that part of the site.  enter eblah auth.  

if the user is logged in, you will get the value of $username - in your perl script - set to the user's name.  if the user isn't logged in, you will $username will equal "Guest."  the calling script can then deal with it appropriately.

does that make sense?

So it uses the E-Blah usernames to authorize access to other scripts?

It provides the 'engine' to do that yep.

that's exactly right craig.  eventually i'd love to see eblah become more module based and provide this and other things as functions. For example -

Code use Eblah; $username=Eblah::GetUser || Eblah::ForceLogin;

the idea is that Eblah itself would use those modules as well, so even when Eblah changes, mods rarely have to be updated.

There would have to be a total rewrite, which I haven't the time to do, though.  

that's ok - in the meantime people can use this mod!  i'll (hopefully) update it in v9 if the login routines change...

Ok from what i understand it sounds really cool! but 2 questions,

1. How do i use it? Do I just upload this script to the Blah directory and then write another seperate script for my area that requires authorization that include the line
require "EblahAuth.pl"
and then say if $username is not guest then do one thing and if it is guest then do something else?

2. Can I set it so that a user has to be in a certain eblah member group to gain access?

that's exactly correct.  after the require "EblahAuth.pl" line, the variable $username will be set to the user's username, or Guest if the user is not logged in.

there is currently no support for user groups, but its a good idea for the future.

by the way, this hasn't been tested on eblah 9 - if anyone has tried it successfully (or not), please post.

thanks!

Well i am on eblah 9 at the moment so if i get it working i will let you know!

o.0 um, why couldn't you just be like:

Code <?php if (isset($_COOKIE["BlahNAME"])) { echo " CONTENT HERE "; } else { echo "Sorry, but you must <a href=\"http://yoursite.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?,v=login\"; } ?>

and I'm thinking this code you created  is for making extra member areas for members.. i think it'd be easier to use in PHP lol

1. that will only work to tell you if the user is logged in or not, not who is logged in

2. you want the value of $username native in your own script

3. you dont want to use php

4. setting a cookie is easy which makes that method insecure (the assumption being that eblah uses a hash in the cookie value and verifies everytime Blah.cgi is accessed - i never actually bothered to check this though)

1. Blah

2. Blah

3. yes i do!

4. That was an example, you could easily write a script to make sure the password and username of the cookie are correct. (read from the .DAT file)

1. ok
2. ok
3. its for perl lovers
4. thats what this is, except it uses native blah code.

Personally I think that it'd be easier in PHP. I use to be interested in coding in PERL, but  I found PHP to be much easier to understand. Learned alot the first day  I tried it.