Never has a framework been so easy to manage, and yet so powerful. I’ve been playing with Codeigniter for over a month now and I must say… It feels good. I made a small footprint in the CI world. I managed to integrate the Vanilla Forum engine with one of the authentication systems used by Codeigniter.

Codeigniter is great framework in and of itself, but it does not come with a built in auth library. Therefore there are many parties who have stepped in to fill this void. I won’t go into details about these libraries, but know that they are all a great choice when it comes time to secure your application. However, the authentication library that I have chosen to use is called CL Auth.

CL Auth is a great authentication library that comes with some pretty useful functions. It was written by Jason Ashdown (Flash UK over at the CI Forums) and inspired by the FreakAuth Light Authentication Library.

Here is a quick feature list:

* Remember Me (inspired by phpBB3)
* Forgotten Password
* DB Sessions
* Better Captcha
* URI Auth management (see below)
* Email Verification
* Login using Username OR Email address
* Password encryption with MD5 MCrypt
* Extendable user profile
* Optimised for performance

CL Auth does not come with an Admin Panel

CL Auth is compatible with CodeIgniter 1.6.3 (verified)

The system takes a new spin on authentication by using a uri management system for handling users and groups.

I decided to drum up an integration of this authentication library with the Vanilla Forum Engine. Vanilla is another, clean, modular, and state of the art forum engine that takes a different approach to managing a forum.

Check out the integration wiki here.

Now it’s back to coding.