root-cookie – Tutorial 1: Accessing WordPress cookies from custom scripts.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, this is the 1st in a planned short series of tutorials for my root cookie WordPress plugin.
I’ve decided to start with the purpose I wrote the plugin, then I’ll move onto a couple of tutorial which answer some of the FAQs I get.
Scenario.
Before you start you need a working copy BLANK of WordPress, in a sub directory, with a url like domain.com/wordpress.
A BLANK copy is a fresh install, using the default theme and only my root-cookie plugin installed, remember after activating the plugin clear your browsers cookies.
Getting Started.
So you have a ready & waiting copy of WP, next create a directory called “my-scripts” or whatever you like, and in it create 1.php with the following contents:
<?php
print_r($_COOKIE);
?>
Browse to domain.com/my-scripts/1.php and you’ll get a blank white page with Array().
Next log into WordPress, and re-fresh 1.php and you should get something like….
Array ( [wordpress_xxxxxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyyyyy] => admin|1241455565|xxxxxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyyyyy [wordpress_logged_in_xxxxxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyyyyy] => admin|1241455565|xxxxxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyyyyy )
Done! You’ve just accessed WordPress’s cookies 
Now when I first started I had a very basic script which hid my Google adverts when I’m logged in, it’s against Google’s policies to click on your own adverts so to avoid accidents I wanted to hide them.
The following script is NOT secure, it doesn’t check that you’ve logged into WordPress it simply checks that you a cookie set with the right username (which anyone can fake) but for my purpose this was fine, I had no issues with users faking cookies to get rid of the adverts*
<?php
if (isset($_COOKIE["wordpress_logged_in_fxxxxxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"])) {
$cookie = $_COOKIE["wordpress_logged_in_xxxxxxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"];
$cookie_elements = explode('|', $cookie);
if ($cookie_elements[0] == "admin") {
echo "<h1>Hello admin!< </h1>";
}
}
?>
Replace admin with whatever username your using and job done! Next time Accessing two WordPress installs domain.com/blog1 domain.com/blog2 with root-cookie
*this will not work now, as I do something different.
