Hi,

I basically have three questions:

1) Is it safe to use the member registration and authentication of the forum module for the rest of my site? I just don't want to use it to authenticate my users to use the forum but for other site features as well. So that I don't need another module for authentication and to make it more integrated.

2) If the answer to question 1 is yes, how can I also check whether or not the user is logged in or not? Because here is what I want: I want it to be the first thing my users see when they visit the site, a login form or when they are logged in, it says welcome "username".

3) How can I grab the sessions for that? So that I can handle the access to other site features as well.

Thanks!

It'll be fine to use the forum sign in for other parts. Member sign in is a global SS feature so if you sign in to the forum that member is logged in for the rest of the site.

If you want to check a member is logged in you can check in the template using <% if CurrentMember %>Hi $CurrentMember.FirstName<% end_if %>. Or if you need to check for the member in your PHP code you can do Member::currentUser(); which returns a member object if they are logged in or null / false if they aren't logged in.