Anonymous user can't view CiviCRM user dashboard in WordPress

Question

I have a wordpress page with a user-dashboard shortcode embedded in it ([civicrm component="user-dashboard" hijack="0"]). When logged in, it works fine. When using a private window (and a user id and checksum) I get told I must be logged in to view the page.

I assumed that I had forgotten to set the permission for anonymous users and the user-dashboard, but it seems I have that set correctly: I assume I'm missing something else obvious, but web searches (including this database) have revealed nothing. I would love an answer or even a suggestion of where to look.

Based on the suggestion below, I've added some debug code to the user-dashboard:

  public function __construct() {
parent::__construct();
echo "<!-- " . CRM_Core_Permission::check('access Contact Dashboard') . " -->\n";
if (!CRM_Core_Permission::check('access Contact Dashboard')) {
  CRM_Utils_System::redirect(CRM_Utils_System::url('civicrm/dashboard', 'reset=1'));
}

$this->_contactId = CRM_Utils_Request::retrieve('id', 'Positive', $this);
$userID = CRM_Core_Session::singleton()->getLoggedInContactID();

echo "<!-- userID:" . $userID . " -->\n";
$userChecksum = $this->getUserChecksum();
echo "<!-- userChecksum:" . $userChecksum . " -->\n";

I was somewhat surprised to see that the checksum and cid aren't making it there:

<!-- 1 -->
<!-- userID: -->
<!-- userChecksum: -->
<div id="crm-container" class="crm-container" lang="en" xml:lang="en">

Now, this is a Wordpress page, not a civiCRM page, but I assumed that since there is a shortcode to add the user-dashboard, that these values would come through as well. Am I deluded in thinking this?

For completeness, here is the (slightly redacted) url: https://mywebsite.com/workshop-registration/?aca11184e16a867aeee5f317ab706f58_1570552008_1440&cid=2

I also tried this one just in case: https://mywebsite.com/workshop-registration/?cs=aca11184e16a867aeee5f317ab706f58_1570552008_1440&cid=2

Answer 1

So, to close the loop on this, the answer is this:

1. inside WP, but outside CiviCRM, the checksum and cid need to be identified on the GET string as cs and id respectively
2. inside CiviCRM, the checksum stands alone (no separate variable, though it seems to work as cs too) and the client id must be cid as id is used for other purposes in CiviCRM.

I discovered no way to cleanly pass these values through a page. I used a PHP insertion plugin to Wordpress to extract the values from the $_GET global array and pass them back into the page.

Thanks to Demerit in helping me figure this out.