WordPress MU and LDAP
April 17, 2007 — techxplorerRecently some colleagues and I started a project to get the library staff newsletter up and running again. In the true spirit of Library 2.0 we’re using a WordPress based blog. Response has been positive so far, and there have been initial discussions about using blogging for other projects as well.
Rather than have numerous instances of WordPress running for separate tasks I’ve just started investigating the possibility of using WordPress MU. So far my initial investigations have been positive. We need to make the system as easy to use as possible and therefore having a separate user name / password for a blog is not ideal. Everyone on campus is registered with the University LDAP server and therefore for authentication I’ve been looking into the WPMU LDAP Authentication Plug-in.
Unfortunately there were a couple of minor issues I discovered while testing the plugin:
- It sounds obvious, but make sure the LDAP module for PHP is installed and working correctly. When I started testing the plugin I was getting the dreaded “white screen of death”. I had assumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that the LDAP module for PHP was installed. One I installed it the “white screen of death” went away.
- I needed to make a small change to the code on line 132 of the ldap_core.php file I needed change this:
if (($this->connection_handle) && ($this->dn)) {To this:
if ($this->connection_handle) {I’m not sure exactly what the purpose of the second check is as yet, still investigating, but essentially it stopped the authentication from occurring. The first stage of the process, and anonymous bind and search for the user, worked as expected with the second stage, binding as the user, failing. By changing the line authentication now works
The plugin is no working really well and I can now move on to exploring and testing other aspects of the system. I’ll post more in the future about the project as it progresses.
April 17, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Hi Corey, UQ Library is using Lyceum for a similar purpose. I had to basically rewrite the LDAP plugin too. I evaluated WP MU briefly and felt that the plugins would be too hard to modify for MU. Are you liking the WP MU experience and did you evaluate lyceum at any point? Just curious as I sometimes wonder if there are advantages with WP MU that we’re missing out on.
April 26, 2007 at 6:30 am
We’re evaluating wordpress-mu for a similar setup and I’d like to hear more about how this is going for you. Have you found any particular wpmu resource(s) to be valuable?
Thanks,
Neal
May 1, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Matt,
I had a brief look at Lyceum and found that I wasn’t 100% happy with it. Nothing really jumped out at me as being “bad” just the overall experience. Plus I thought if I was going to use WordPress I should use the multi user edition provided by the developers, not one that is a branch of the original code.
As far as plugins go, I don’t think we’ll be having very many in any WordPress MU blogs. They’ll all be on an internal network, not accessible from the outside world, so spam etc. won’t be a problem.
Other than that, I should stress I’ve only scratched the surface and have made no firm decision one way or the other.
May 1, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Neal,
The only real sites I’ve been using in my brief evaluation have been the Official WordPress MU website. http://mu.wordpress.org/ the forums http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/ and the development website http://wpmudev.org/
Best of luck with your project.
January 29, 2008 at 9:32 am
[...] To achieve this goal typically requires integration of WordPress with the organisations LDAP directory, or another directory type service that is accessible over LDAP such as Active Directory. This integration has been an issue in the past for me. [...]
May 1, 2008 at 8:01 am
[...] WordPress MU and LDAP « Tech Explorer Been tweaking around with this at work. (tags: wordpress ldap) [...]