Autenticate against another Joomla install?

[deepthoughts]

Now that Joomla 1.5 has the wonderful plugin architecture wouldn't it be possible to create a plugin (or a set of plugins) that authenticates against another Joomla installation? The ideal situation would be that you could turn of user registration on all sites except the "master site" and yet have Community Builder working (could it be so that the plugin needs to insert the users into the site that has no registration for this to work?).

SSO for all your Joomla sites would also be a great feature but I don't know if it's doable.

Is all this possible? Would this kind of authentication (and user?) plugin be difficult to create? Could you use Joomlas default authentication and user plugins as a starting point?

[kdevine]

Now that Joomla 1.5 has the wonderful plugin architecture wouldn't it be possible to create a plugin (or a set of plugins) that authenticates against another Joomla installation? The ideal situation would be that you could turn of user registration on all sites except the "master site" and yet have Community Builder working (could it be so that the plugin needs to insert the users into the site that has no registration for this to work?).

Yes you can build an authentication plugin so that your users can login to your Joomla sub-sites using their account details from your main Joomla site. Your users would only have to register in one place and use the account on all your Joomla sites.

SSO for all your Joomla sites would also be a great feature but I don't know if it's doable.

Single Sign On is different and not possible with just the authentication or user plugins. It would require some integration with a SAML protocol. (I mean Single Sign On as your users logs in to your main site once and the authenticated session is carried through all of your sub-sites)

[deepthoughts]

Yes you can build an authentication plugin so that your users can login to your Joomla sub-sites using their account details from your main Joomla site. Your users would only have to register in one place and use the account on all your Joomla sites.

That's good and I sorta suspected that, I just wanted to confirm it. One more question though... If I wanted to use components or plugins that extend the user profile of Joomla (Community Builder is a good example) wouldn't that require that the user is in Joomlas user table? Are you added automatically when you are authenticated for the first time or is this something that the auth-plugin need to handle (i.e. if user not in local user-table add user)?

Single Sign On is different and not possible with just the authentication or user plugins. It would require some integration with a SAML protocol. (I mean Single Sign On as your users logs in to your main site once and the authenticated session is carried through all of your sub-sites)

It would be cool but it's not necessary. But it's good to know what it would take to implement


Now I only wish that I was good enough to be able to write this authentication plugin.