Question

Hi I’m looking to create a simple Forgot Password system using CakePHP where a user will type in their username/email and then receive an email with a link they can click to create a new password.

I’ve Googled around but not found anything :/

Using CakePHP 1.3

Answer 1

1. Display a view with a form so that the user can enter their e-mail address.
2. Have the form post to a reset_password controller action.
3. In the reset_password controller action look for this->data['User']['email'] and store the email address in a database table.
4. This same database table should have a key or token field. This field should be CHAR(40). In the reset_password action do $key = Security::hash(String::uuid(),'sha1',true) to create a key or hash and store it in the key or token field.
5. To generate the URL do $url = Router::url( ($this->here), true ).'/'.$key inside the controllers reset_password action. This will generate a url based on the current action and append to it the key parameter which you can verify in this same function when the user clicks the email link.
6. You’ll also need to setup the Email component to actually send the e-mail including the generated URL above in the message body.

This should be enough to get you going in the right direction.