[wp-edu] Federated Authentication? Anyone thought about it?

[Patrick Laverty]

We found that the new Shib plugin does work and fix the authors
problem as described in the thread.  However it doesn't fix the
username issue.  We're still running into that.

All the filtering and sanitizing is being done after the registration,
and that's where the problem is coming in.  First time registrants
trying to log in to the system.  When WP tries to create their
account, the @ and . are killing it.  But if they're already in the
system, logging in is no problem.

So one solution is that we can add every user at our University and
then there will be no problems with that.

However one of the major reasons to use Shibboleth (along with SSO) is
federation.  I don't know who's going to need access from other
institutions and I really don't want to be creating those on an
as-needed basis.  So we'd prefer for this to work.

I'm guessing that this is just another filter that needs to happen in
the account creation where the @ and . is allowed.  We're just trying
to find the right place and the right hooks to make it happen.

If anyone else thinks they know what would make that work, it would be
appreciated.

Thanks.

Patrick

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Patrick Laverty
<patrick_laverty at brown.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Amy Hendrix <amy.hendrix at duke.edu> wrote:
>> Hi Patrick,
>>
>> Are you using the latest version of the WP Shib plugin? It now
>> sanitizes names order to deal with the @ problem. We're using it to
>> allow integration with our existing login systems, and not (yet) for
>> off-campus logins, but if the problem you're having is just the name
>> syntax that shouldn't make a difference. There are some details here:
>> http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-shibboleth-username-at-risk-of-breaking-permalinks-with-author
>> (note that that thread is about broken links, but it gets into user
>> name rewriting further down the thread).
>
>
> Thanks Amy, I added the couple lines of code suggested in that thread.
>  We're testing to see if it helps.    We are using the 1.4 version of
> the Shib plugin, and we do still get an error from formatting.php when
> a new user successfully authenticates.  Hopefully the code in that
> discussion thread gets us around the problem.
>
> Thank you.
>