stop htaccess popup box

rikmoncur

DISCLAIMER:
I've had a good search through the forum and google but can't find any up-to-date solutions to this.

PREAMBLE:
I want to put a forum into a directory and password protect that directory with htaccess.

Users log into a members area of the site with php authentication and I would like them to be able to access the protected directory with the same login details but without the htaccess popping up its username/password box.

The old solution was to pass the username/password in the url but that doesn't work now.

PROBLEM:
Is there a way to pass the username/password to the htaccess and so preventing the htaccess password box from popping up?

benracer

Would it not be easier to use the session password protection method?

rikmoncur

I'm not quite sure what you mean benracer.

To log into the members area of the site, the session variables are set to the username/password, as normal in php user authentication.

Then they access the forum (I'll be using SMF forum and I'm not sure I want to figure out how to use the session variables with SMF's templates - surely that would be a big job and probably get broken with forum software updates?)

So instead, it's easier to put the forum in a directory and password protect that directory with htaccess.

I just want to make it as seamless as possible for the user by stopping the pop up box for the htaccess.

Is there a better way of doing this?

benracer

Have a look at this..
http://www.phpeasystep.com/phptu/6.html

rikmoncur

thanx for your input benracer but I've no trouble with normal authentication.

For anyone interested, there's a rather long-winded ajax hack here:
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21052&page=2&highlight=+htaccess+php+pass

Ajax isn't what I'm looking for tho.

UPDATE:
I didn't find a real solution to this problem but I did find a way to integrate SMF forum into a site using php authentication, without htaccess.