Including CodeIgniter content from ExpressionEngine

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
While I wait for 2.0 ...

I have a site fully developed in CodeIgniter, including a sidebar which has different content based on whether you're logged in or not.

I'm building a news section using ExpressionEngine, and would like to include the sidebar as it appears on the CI parts of the site.

Using PHP in my EE templates, I can use

Code:

file_get_contents

to include the contents of a controller I've set up. It works as intended, apart from the fact that the content returned is the unauthenticated content, even if I'm logged in.

So I'm thinking there's got to be a trick to keep all the CI session and state stuff when you navigate over to the EE part of the site, or some other way to do this. Does anyone have any pointers?


Thanks,
Pål