Hi,

We're building a site which includes MediaWiki and some other tools (Drupal, BSCW, etc.) and needs unified log-in. I've seen some posts and code contributions on other types of authentication (not using AuthPlugin but outright replacing Special:Userlogin) but they were a bit too specific for some purpose and changed the main code a lot. So I thought up yet another way to do things: why not enclose User::loadFromSession() in Setup.php with an if:

if(!something($wgUser)) { // declare as something(&$user) to get ref $wgUser = User::loadFromSession(); }

This will permit an extension/plugin to load $wgUser from somewhere else: say HTTP auth or a different set of cookies, perhaps creating the local MediaWiki user on-the-fly. The extension can also choose to let User::loadFromSession() do the work by returning false or dump some error message and exit.

After some tests, I think this little change is all that's needed to get an alternative log-in to work. The question is what should something() really be?

1) wfRunHooks(..) might seem like a natural choice, but extention functions are yet to be executed at this stage, so an extention wouldn't have had a chance to register its hooks.

2) a new global, $wgUserLoadHook, is perhaps a good alternative

3) a new method, $wgAuth->userLoad($wgUser), is what I used though, because overriding some AuthPlugin methods is all that was necessary to get it working.

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Working example: http://stan.gmuf.com/wik/authpatch/ contains a patch and two plugins: one is a generic HttpAuthPlugin that can be extended, the other is a skeleton for a plugin extending HttpAuthPlugin.

1) cd MediaWiki's dir; patch -p1 </path/to/patch 2) download the two plugins to include/ 3) put require_once('BscwAuthPlugin.php') in LocalSettings.php 4) put MediaWiki's dir in a http auth protected realm 5) test: when you log in via http auth, MediaWiki recognizes you (perhaps creating your local user on-the-fly).

Note: As expected, Special:Userlog{in,out} will not work. The skin could hide the links.

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What do you think, does this patch seem like a good solution which could go into MediaWiki?

Greetings, Stanislav