When developing for WordPress, sometimes you may need to create a PHP script that will automatically login a user so you can enable user functions. I needed to do something like that when creating a public form to submit posts from the front end using Ajax. The WorpPress function wp_singon() was the perfect solution.
wp_signon()
The wp_signon() function takes the user account’s username and password as parameters, and will allow you to set up a secure cookie for the new session. For more info, check out the function’s codex page: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_signon
Another way to auto-login:
Cleverwp.com has an interesting post on how to Autologin a WordPress user in your PHP script which only requires the user’s login name. It’s pretty straight forward, though not as secure.
