title: How to access Magento customer's session from outside Magento?
body: <p>First up, my question is very similar to questions asked in Stackoverflow (and the web) such as:
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1098871/how-to-access-magento-users-session-from-outside-magento">How to access Magento user&#39;s session from outside Magento?</a></p>
  
  <p>What I need is, if a customer is logged into a Magento site, I want him to be logged on to a forum too. But try as I might, I'm unable to get isLoggedIn() to be true. Any suggestions on what I might be missing? Here's the minimal code chunk that should get me logged-in information:</p>
  
  <pre><code>require_once '/abs/path/to/Mage.php';
  umask(0);
  Mage::app('default');
  Mage::getSingleton('core/session', array('name' =&gt; 'frontend'));
  $session = Mage::getSingleton('customer/session');           
  Zend_Debug::dump($session-&gt;isLoggedIn());
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I checked the following:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>cookie path is set to '/'</li>
  <li>I dumped the $session variable and didn't get wiser</li>
  <li>As <a href="http://stuntsnippets.com/access-magento-session-from-external-site/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">described here,</a> I tried setting "Use Session ID in frontend", but it appears my Magento doesn't have that option (We use magento 1.3.2.4).</li>
  <li>I'm checking the variable of course by logging in and out as a customer</li>
  <li>Am including mage.php</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Any help on what I might be missing?</p>