Authenticating Joomla with Third Party Application

One of the biggest challenges in Joomla is to authenticate Joomla with Third Party Applications (TPA) to provide certain or all features of TPA.

Let’s take a case, a site running on phpBB plans to revamp the entire site by implementing a CMS while not affecting their existing phpBB setup and data. The owner plans to use Joomla and plans to implement authentication with phpBB so that user does not have to sign in again and can use all the features of phpBB as if they were features in Joomla.

There are two possible options:
 1. Authenticating Joomla along with Third Party Application
 2. Authenticating with only Third Party Application by bypassing Joomla's authentication

Authenticating with Joomla! along with Third Party Application
This is an ideal and easy way to extend the behavior by using common identity in both the applications, if there is a way to use unique identity between the systems.

However if there is no common identity the best is to add a field in table (Joomla! User table)  which acts as the common identity between the two systems.

Once common field is identified the same can be used to interact with TPA by best possible available interface and pass the unique field to do specific tasks on TPA. Following is the high level diagram illustrating the flow.

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