WordPress MU

Hiya,

Bringing up that old LDAP thing again :o)

From my perspective a lot of institutions are making poor decisions by choosing Drupal or the awful Blojsom (review here... couldn't even get the 'multi user' going really: http://incsub.org/?p=31) as multi-user tools.

And the reason they are going down this path is almost invariably their simple LDAP integration (yes, that makes them pretty dumb but that's just wot their IT depts tell them to do most of the time).

So... simple LDAP integration, a la the LDAP plugin: http://patcavit.com/2005/05/11/wordpress-ldap-and-playing-nicely/

Would, I think, push WPMU through to uptake quicker than pretty much anything else that could be added.

Cheers, Farms

Do you have the facilities to test this? I used an LDAP server briefly years ago but not since.
Using a regular WordPress plugin is the wrong way of authenticating IMO. It has to be a core feature of the system and people shouldn't have to worry about activating or deactivating a plugin.
I'm not sure how we could activate it. If there was some sort of super-user admin panel only available to the admin of the "main" blog, it could appear there, or it could be a simple config edit. I would not put it as an option of the installer. 99.9999% of people would have no use for it!

Agreed, it has to be in the core and the 'super-user admin' panel idea that Dasher put together, to me, would be the best kind of mechanism to run with (makes it *dead* simple)

I'm trying to get some LDAP details for testing purposes, shouldn't be too much problem. Can definitely host an install to test with too. Anything else I could help with on that?

(you;re right abut 99.999% of installers not bothering with it but if it worked, about the same number of WPMU blogs could be a direct result of it!)

Any further progress on LDAP for WPMU? I am looking for a possible corporate blogging platform and WPMU would rock if I could get LDAP going.

I've been following the development of WPMU for the past several months in an attempt to implement blogging software in a college environment (~1200 students). LDAP authentication is a necessity. If WPMU offered LDAP authentication I would install it in a heartbeat. I think there's a huge market for WPMU in the higher ed arena.

are there any news regarding LDAP and MU-wordpress? i just got the wordpress ldap-hack running and was wondering if there is any plan of integrating that in mu-wordpress..

If you supply me with a patch at donncha @ linux.ie I'll apply it if it can live alongside the regular login code.
I don't have an LDAP server and haven't played with one in years so I can't help much with it's development unfortunately.

i am using the current single-user wordpress with the LDAP-hack. what kind of modifications would we need to apply this ldap hack to mu-wordpress?

Why not try it yourself?
I'm mired in figuring out how the livesearch stuff works at the moment and haven't got the time to devote to look at anything else.

We don't so much want LDAP authentication as LDAP authorization. We have a WebISO at our University and want that to handle authentication, but we'd love to be able authorize people do to certain things based on LDAP. For example..

Have WPMU auto-create author accounts for everyone in Group A by checking the LDAP server for users in a certain posixGroup or with a certain group attribute. These users would have full posting access.

-Have WPMU auto-allow comments by everyone in Group B using their LDAP memberships.

We do *not* want to have to manually create accounts for each student. Ideally WPMU would parse the LDAP server and automatically create authors based on usernames.

I'm responding to Farm's post:

From my perspective a lot of institutions are making poor decisions by choosing Drupal or the awful Blojsom (review here... couldn't even get the 'multi user' going really: http://incsub.org/?p=31) as multi-user tools.
And the reason they are going down this path is almost invariably their simple LDAP integration (yes, that makes them pretty dumb but that's just wot their IT depts tell them to do most of the time).

I think you've dismissed blojsom far too easily. The user interface is much better than it used to be, and it's more powerful than most competitors.

Most of your complaints in that 'review' are answered in the documentation, ie how to add users, etc etc.

And as far as your comments regarding the version Apple supply with OS X Server, it is completely different, and should be judged on it's own merits. It is a stripped down version, with auto-blog creation for users and groups, easy to edit templates, a new admin interface, etc etc. That being said, we're still running the stock blojsom, as we want the more powerful features.

I'm one of those 'IT dept' people who is responsible for running large scale blogs, I have about 300 staff blogs, and about 2000 student blogs.

LDAP integration is a must. It's not just an IT dept being 'stupid'. You try managing several thousand users and having to manage passwords for individual services. It quite easily turns into a support nightmare.

I really do like WordPress by the way. I think it's elegant, and fills a certain niche very well, it's just not very good for large scale installations where directory services integration is necessary.

The strengths of blojsom for me are:

* No database needed.
* Seamless LDAP integration.
* fine-grained control over plugins.
* fine-grained control over user access levels.

The downsides are:
* Hard to edit templates (but I've done a CSS only template to get around this)
* Requires Tomcat.

I wanted to reiterate that I'm not bagging WordPress here at all, just pointing out why it is that LDAP integration is needed, and the features of competitors like blojsom that have led institutions like mine to choose it over WordPress.

And in the interest of giving the WordPress people more ideas to think about for large scale installations...

Blojsom CVS now has a facility for file-upload quotas. This is something that is really really handy for institutions.

just tried to use the single-user ldap plugin in wpmu, but get the following error message

[02-Dec-2005 17:51:56] PHP Fatal error: Cannot redeclare wp_login() (previously declared in /home/httpd/sites/ccproducer.org/htdocs/wp-inst/wp-content/mu-plugins/pluggable.php:3) in /home/httpd/sites/ccproducer.org/htdocs/wp-inst/wp-content/plugins/ldap_auth.php on line 202

looks like the pluggable-functions still didn't make it into wordpress-mu?

from the developer-site of the LDAP-auth-plugin 1.01 http://patcavit.com/2005/05/11/wordpress-ldap-and-playing-nicely/
With the release of WordPress 1.5.1 and the new pluggable-functions.php page certain functions can now be defined in plugins before the default definition is provided.

any ideas? if i would have any directions on how to contribute, i would try to hack the core by myself...

I use wordpressmu_1.0.803-ldap_auth-1.0.0 plugin available at http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com/project/WPMU-LDAP-Authentication-Plug-in/#project_bottom

It works fine with wordpressMU 1.0, but is broken in 1.1.1

I agree with some of the points raised in this thread. MU would receive a great boost from the additional developers that come with university adoption. LDAP authentication/integration is key to this.

I have gotten wordpressmu_1.0.803-ldap_auth-1.0.0 plugin working with WPMU 1.1.1, but it has to be a fresh installation of WPMU.

For blog migration, I had to ask all existing blog users to re-login to create their new profile/login with their AD credential, and then manually import their original posts one user at a time. We only had about 20 some internal users, so that made workload significantly less.

I have tried many other methods to integrate LDAP plugin into existing WPMU 1.0 or new WPMU 1.1.1 with original DB without success. There is a conflict with the AD username and existing blog's username. I get the same redirected blank page during the tests. Not sure if there is easy way to restore all original users or mysql DB.

Hopefully this info helps

Ben @KnowNow