Question

I would like to change the default behavior of Joomla’s password reminding mechanism. I would like to be provided with checking of the strength of a password and (optionally) with captcha capabilities. I was wondering if there’s a free component for Joomla which I could install and use out-of-the-box.

Answer 1

If you don’t mind hacking around in the core code, then you can look in the components\com_user\controller.php file. In the save() function, around line 82, it retrieves the user’s password. At that point you could insert whatever code you like to check the password strength:

$passOK = true; if($post['password'] != $post['password2']) {     $msg = JText::_('PASSWORDS_DO_NOT_MATCH');     $passOK = false; } else if (strlen($post['password']) < 6 || !preg_match('/[0-9]/', $post['password'])) {     $msg = 'The password is too short, or it doesn't contain any numbers.';     $passOK = false; } if (!$passOK) {     $return = @$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];     if (empty($return) || !JURI::isInternal($return)) {         $return = JURI::base();     }     $this->setRedirect($return, $msg, 'error');     return false; }