WP as intranet – need to authenticate users

  • Hi,

    I’ve been playing with WP on a test machine (windows xp) with a view to building an intranet. I’m running WP 2.7.1 on Apache 2.0, PHP 5 and MySQL 5.1. So far so good and I’ve been building the site content slowly.

    One area we need to investigate is how we authenticate our users. Ideally, this would be done automatically in the background when they visit the intranet site, rather than typing a username/password. The idea is to have the homepage say “Welcome John” or whoever it is that visits the page. Also we would like a page where they can view reports and document relevant only to them.

    As we have Active Directory it makes sense to use LDAP to authenticate the users. My question is how is this done?

    I’ve found the plugin called http-authentication but this relies on the mod_auth_ldap Apache module being loaded. When I look at the httpd.conf file I don’t see it listed in the “LoadModule” section (with or without a “#”), but the modeule does appear in the program folder, under \Apache Group\Apache2\Modules. In fact “mod_auth.ldap.so” and “util_ldap.so” both appear in this folder.

    If this module needs to be loaded then what line do I need to add to my httpd.conf file?

    Once I’ve got this loaded I guess my next step is to test and make sure I get a authentication prompt when I visit the site. Provided I can authenticate successfully I would then like WP to create user accounts automatically if a new user visits the site. I presume this is possible with either the “Simple LDAP Login” or “wpDirAuth” plugins?

    With unique user names in WP we can use another plugin to secure access to the various reports we want made available to individual users. (Or is there a better way of doing it?)

    Has anyone accomplished this already for their intranet? Any tips, experience, help is greatly appreciated. I’m a complete novice, and started using WP, php and Apache for the first time 3 days ago!

    Many thanks

    Mike.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter mikewall

    (@mikewall)

    Can no one offer me any advice with this?

    I’m in the same boat here…we’re going to be using WP in out Intranet scenario and would like to be able to integrate this in seemlessly with an auto-login of our existing Windows users.

    Can anyone shed some light on how to make this work – either by use of this plugin or any others that would allow for passing in the credentials of the currently logged in user (logged into a Windows domain)?

    Thanks,

    Dink

    Hi,

    Has anyone found a solution to this?

    I am currently using an alternative product but would like to merge it into a WP project due to ease and of course, generally being great.

    Any thoughts very grateful,

    Thanks,

    Gabi

    if your users are predominantly using internet explorer you can take advantage of the following. Although I am running a intranet site using ASP you can google to see if you can capture the same with PHP.

    IE can grab the username from windows OS, see example below.

    <%
dim user_name, user_name_parts, authuser
' get the username from the client machine
authuser = Server.HTMLEncode(Request.ServerVariables("AUTH_USER"))

' split the username string
user_name_parts=Split(authuser, "\")

' return only the username
user_name = user_name_parts(1)
%>

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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