-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l- bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Brian Carpenter Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 2:39 PM To: mediawiki-l@wikimedia.org Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Best strategy to populate User data from Single Sign On?
I would like the common name (Bobby Jones) to appear on MediaWiki pages as Username. But to account for duplicate names (200,000+ employees here) it would be acceptable to have the Username be Commonfullname_Uniqueemployeenum (Bobby Jones 395234).
What happens when Roberta Jones gets married and becomes 'Roberta Chang' a.k.a. 'Bobby Chang'? The next time she visits the wiki, 'Bobby Chang 395234' will not be found in the user table and the AutoLogin script will create a new user. Poor Bobby will now have to manage a double identity. Or worse, she will email me and ask if I can move all her old history/data/pages to her new name.
A) I don't know how to do that B) there are 200,000+ potential wiki users here. About half of them could all get married, divorced, widowed and remarried,
Best to figure this out before we release this to production, _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
There was an extension for mediawiki 1.5:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Renameuser
Not sure if it still works.
Otherwise, you may have to use some kind of login that will never change (not terribly easy with people getting married).
If you use LDAP, you can extend my LDAP Authentication plugin to incorporate the code from the rename user extension, and some tracking mechanism in LDAP to tell when a user has changed names, and automatically rename their old account.
If you verify the rename user code works, I may be able to help you with adding it to my plugin.
Also, my plugin supports pulling preferences from the LDAP server. So you can have their "Real Name" and "Nickname" preferences updated automatically if it is changed in LDAP.
If you aren't using LDAP, then sorry for the bother :).
V/r,
Ryan Lane
Thanks for the response, and the offer. I'll look more closely at that extension but I'm not sure if it applies to us. We are using LDAP data but not performing MediaWiki embedded LDAP authentication. Our whole wiki resides on a Signal signon-protected site. Any visitor is intercepted, SSO authenticated and then redirected to the originally requested url. SSO merely provides LDAP data in header variables that are pulled into mediawiki by Auth_remoteuser.php extension to AuthPlugin.php. The extension either logs-in the user(if username exists), or creates a new user from LDAP info.
But a rename extension might still work if there was a way to check the database before creating a new user to see if any existing username ends with the same uniqueemployeenum as contained within the about-to-be-created username. If so, evoke a change username function. I don't have a clue what that function would do (possibly go to the MySQL data table "<prefix>user" and change 'user_name' for that 'user_id"???)
-----
On 4/28/06, Lane, Ryan wrote:
There was an extension for mediawiki 1.5:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Renameuser
Not sure if it still works.
Otherwise, you may have to use some kind of login that will never change (not terribly easy with people getting married).
If you use LDAP, you can extend my LDAP Authentication plugin to incorporate the code from the rename user extension, and some tracking mechanism in LDAP to tell when a user has changed names, and automatically rename their old account.
If you verify the rename user code works, I may be able to help you with adding it to my plugin.
Also, my plugin supports pulling preferences from the LDAP server. So you can have their "Real Name" and "Nickname" preferences updated automatically if it is changed in LDAP.
If you aren't using LDAP, then sorry for the bother :). Ryan Lane
-----
Brian wrote>
I would like the common name (Bobby Jones) to appear on MediaWiki pages
as
Username. But to account for duplicate names (200,000+ employees here)
it
would be acceptable to have the Username be Commonfullname_Uniqueemployeenum (Bobby Jones 395234).
What happens when Roberta Jones gets married and becomes 'Roberta Chang' a.k.a. 'Bobby Chang'? The next time she visits the wiki, 'Bobby Chang 395234' will not be
found
in the user table and the AutoLogin script will create a new user. Poor Bobby will now have to manage a double identity. Or worse, she will email me
and
ask if I can move all her old history/data/pages to her new name.
A) I don't know how to do that B) there are 200,000+ potential wiki users here. About half of them
could
all get married, divorced, widowed and remarried, Best to figure this out before we release this to production,
Ryan - I tried http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Renameuser and it works great in MW 1.6.3! Thanks for the suggestion. And thanks to Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason -the author
It took some digging - as there are very few comments within the code or in the meta article. Browsing other articles about Special extension pages revealed:
*the need to add the the line below to LocalSettings.php if SpecialRenameuser.php is placed in /extensions subfolder. require_once('extensions/SpecialRenameuser.php'); *the need to save the file as SpecialRenameuser.php *to rename a user you must have bureaucrat rights *the page can be access by Special:Renameuserhttp://sitedas.web.fedex.com/purplewiki/index.php?title=Special:Renameuser it also appears at the bottom of Special:Specialpages
Observations: *The original user page remains unchanged. (user can migrate content to new username page.) *Changed tables include user, revision, archive, 'image, oldimage, recentchanges.
Now if I can just create a method to determin if the user exists prior to new user creation - detailed in: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2006-May/011779.html
Thanks again, Brian
On 4/28/06, Brian Carpenter hopespoppa@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for the response, and the offer. I'll look more closely at that extension but I'm not sure if it applies to us. We are using LDAP data but not performing MediaWiki embedded LDAP authentication. Our whole wiki resides on a Signal signon-protected site. Any visitor is intercepted, SSO authenticated and then redirected to the originally requested url. SSO merely provides LDAP data in header variables that are pulled into mediawiki by Auth_remoteuser.php extension to AuthPlugin.php. The extension either logs-in the user(if username exists), or creates a new user from LDAP info.
But a rename extension might still work if there was a way to check the database before creating a new user to see if any existing username ends with the same uniqueemployeenum as contained within the about-to-be-created username. If so, evoke a change username function. I don't have a clue what that function would do (possibly go to the MySQL data table "<prefix>user" and change 'user_name' for that 'user_id"???)
On 4/28/06, Lane, Ryan wrote:
There was an extension for mediawiki 1.5:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Renameuser
Not sure if it still works.
Otherwise, you may have to use some kind of login that will never change (not terribly easy with people getting married).
If you use LDAP, you can extend my LDAP Authentication plugin to incorporate the code from the rename user extension, and some tracking mechanism in LDAP to tell when a user has changed names, and automatically rename their old account.
If you verify the rename user code works, I may be able to help you with adding it to my plugin.
Also, my plugin supports pulling preferences from the LDAP server. So you can have their "Real Name" and "Nickname" preferences updated automatically if it is changed in LDAP.
If you aren't using LDAP, then sorry for the bother :). Ryan Lane
Brian wrote>
I would like the common name (Bobby Jones) to appear on MediaWiki pages
as
Username. But to account for duplicate names (200,000+ employees here)
it
would be acceptable to have the Username be Commonfullname_Uniqueemployeenum (Bobby Jones 395234).
What happens when Roberta Jones gets married and becomes 'Roberta Chang' a.k.a. 'Bobby Chang'? The next time she visits the wiki, 'Bobby Chang 395234' will not be
found
in the user table and the AutoLogin script will create a new user. Poor Bobby will now have to manage a double identity. Or worse, she will email me
and
ask if I can move all her old history/data/pages to her new name.
A) I don't know how to do that B) there are 200,000+ potential wiki users here. About half of them
could
all get married, divorced, widowed and remarried, Best to figure this out before we release this to production,
mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org