Single Sign-on for Third Party Applications with Typo3

Well, I have been meaning to do it for a while now, but looks like now I have no other choice: its time to re-visit Typo3. I have become pretty familiar with this CMS over the last 6-8 months and I worked on a museum site using Typo3 ver 3.8 – but I think its time to ramp up to ver 4.x and start playing a bit more seriously.

“Why?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you why, Sunshine. Single sign-on for Typo3 is an extension that integrates Third Party Applications like phpBB, mediawiki, moodle, and hopefully WordPress sometime soon (I just put in a request for it!). You can see the entire list of open source applications implemented, or being considered, for implementation here. What this means for the educational community seems pretty major. We have spent some time working through ideas for hacking applications like WordPress, Drupal, and Mediawiki together loosely, and have made some progress I might add. But the idea of having a space where users can authenticate on to all of these applications at once, and access them through the Typo3 portal, as well as integrate content through feeds, content elements etc, into this portal-like space offers something close to my vague understanding of eduglu. Here is the blurb on the SSO for Typo3 website:

TYPO3 Single Sign-On is a free (GPL, Open Source) TYPO3 extension by net&works. It provides seamless integration of Third Party (i.e. non-TYPO3) Applications into the TYPO3 frontend.
This includes
* access to Third Party Applications (TPAs) with no additional logon (for authenticated TYPO3-users)
* role-based integration of the TPA into TYPO3 navigation or content
* a sophisticated three-layer security architecture
* no need for server-to-server communication, no need for central reverse proxies
* no need for a common/shared/synchronized password database or even user database

i’ll have to parse some of this before I make claims or promises I regret (uncharacteristic, I know). Nonetheless, i am excited by the idea of having role-based integration which integrates these programes into the Typo3 navigation and content. Making the Typo3 install not something the users will have to manage, but rather an integrated gateway that aggregates applications and content from those applications. They are also working on what the call user propagation, which means “that a user created on the SSO server (e.g. in TYPO3) can now automatically be created on the Third-Party system”. Scalability, anyone? OK, so I am trying not to get too excited but that is difficult because this reminds me a lot of the openacademic.org project Darcy Norman pointed to a week or so ago.

For anyone interested, there is an online demo that demonstrates the logic of this extension. Link.

Thank you for the heads up, Zach. I wish you would start blogging so I don’t feel compelled to pass off these links as if I actually knew something about the interrnets.