Hi,
I've set up a mediawiki installation with users authentication via the
LDAP Authentication Plugin. Unfortunately I have to use the "cn"
attribute in our directory to search and login users. So the "cn"
Attribute is used as the mediawiki username and further mediawiki
attributes (like RealName, Nickname, email) are retrieved from LDAP upon
user creation/login. So my wiki-users have really nice and consistent
NickNames throughout the company and it's ensured that there are no
double-users (because cn is unique in our LDAP tree).
But: It's quite uncomfortable if you look at the recent changes or
change history of a page. By default mediawiki will display the username
of the user who changed the file and not the RealName or NickName.
In my case that would be something like AKxxxxxx (our employee-ID).
Apart from that using an employee-ID as Common-name in LDAP is really
bad in my opinion (but i can't change that), it might be a good feature
if there was an option "$wgUseRealNameInUserLinks" so that the Real Name
is shown in the changes history.
I have hacked that into my installation (1.8.2) and it's only a minor
change in includes/Linker.php:
*** 761,767 ****
* @private
*/
function userLink( $userId, $userText ) {
! $encName = htmlspecialchars( User::whoIsReal($userId) );
if( $userId == 0 ) {
$contribsPage = Title::makeTitle( NS_SPECIAL,
'Contributions' );
return $this->makeKnownLinkObj( $contribsPage,
--- 761,767 ----
* @private
*/
function userLink( $userId, $userText ) {
! $encName = htmlspecialchars( $userText );
if( $userId == 0 ) {
$contribsPage = Title::makeTitle( NS_SPECIAL,
'Contributions' );
return $this->makeKnownLinkObj( $contribsPage,
I think my case is not that unique and this feature would help using
mediawiki in enterprises.
What's your opinion?
Reinhard