Modifying Clickheat to use your authentication

Sep 7, 2010 php

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A nice free open source alternative to Crazy Egg is ClickHeat. One of my clients wanted this implemented but didn’t want to have to log in again using different criteria. I looked at the code and saw it was surprisingly easy to edit to allow a different authentication method. Let’s check it out:

First, open up index.php in your editor. Find the statement where it checks to see if the CLICKHEAT_CONFIG file exists. This should be around line 81. On the opposite side of this IF statement, it then starts to do the authentication. It includes the CLICKHEAT_CONFIG file. Then, it checks to see if isset($_COOKIE).

Above the isset() call and below the clickheat config include, put your custom code. The important line is to define CLICKHEAD_ADMIN. For example, you could do this:

include CLICKHEAT_CONFIG;

if ($_SESSION['userIsAdmin']) {
  define('CLICKHEAT_ADMIN', true);
}
else {
  die(header('/normalLoginPage.php'));
}

Then, you can remove - or comment - the code block that starts with

if (isset($_COOKIE['clickheat']))

all the way down to the end of that IF statement… it ends at these lines:

  }
  $__action = 'login';
}

This should now allow the script to use your authentication system and not its own.