CUNY Academic Commons Announces WPMu-MediaWiki Single Sign-on

I missed this announcement last Thursday while traveling and getting ready for CUNY WordCampEd, but this is pretty exciting news from the CUNY Academic Commons, which promises to become a force in offering up much needed plugins and open source tool integration for open source applications like WPMu, MediaWiki, and the like.

Very cool, MediaWiki and WPMu integration has been the bane of my existence for a while now, and I’ve tested this puppy out on UMW Blogs and it works seamlessly on WPMu 2.6.5+ and MediaWiki versions 1.12.x+. We just need to figure out how to re-direct users who login directly from MediaWiki back to the wiki article they want to edit, and voila!

The CUNY Academic Commons, in partnership with Cast Iron Coding, is proud to announce a collection of MediaWiki extensions that will create a single sign-on system between WordPress Multi-User and MediaWiki.

With this extension, administrators of WordPress Multi-User will be able to add robust wiki functionality to their websites without forcing users to create separate accounts. Now, users will be able to sign in once to the home page of the system and have that sign-in carried over to the wiki.

We’re running this setup currently on the CUNY Academic Commons, a site that was conceived of as an open-source academic social network in which the members of the 23-campus City University of New York system would be able to connect with one another, share resources, and create new communities of interest. The site is built on the following platforms, which can now all be accessed via a single log-in: WordPress Multi-User + BuddyPress + BbPress + MediaWiki.

This integration builds on the fine work of Ciaran Gultnieks, the author of AuthWP, Daniel Kinzler, the author of LockDown, and Marcel Minke, the author RedirectAfterLogout.

We are delighted to release this extension under a GNU General Public License. Full documentation and files can be found here.

Go, CUNY, go!

This entry was posted in mediawiki, plugins, WordPress, wordpress multi-user and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

6 Responses to CUNY Academic Commons Announces WPMu-MediaWiki Single Sign-on

  1. Ron says:

    If logging into WPMU then on the wp-login.php link add a ?redirect_to=htmlencoded_url

  2. Gardner says:

    *Really* exciting stuff here. To my eyes, CUNY is almost perfectly positioned to take us all to the next level. Location, mission, ethos, it’s all there. Your post on CUNY was breathtaking and made me even more grateful to know and collaborate with the great folks there. It’s a wonderful seminary for the reverends in us all.

  3. Ken says:

    This rocks. I’ve been going straight off of wikis lately. Not from a conceptual angle, but certainly from an implementation-related angle. User management in Mediawiki has been a chore. Thank you CUNY.

    One more gripe on wikis – is it just me or do they feel like the dot-matrix printer paper of the web? Give me a blank sheet of paper and I’ll draw or make a paper airplane. Give me dot-matrix paper and I’ll print you off an invoice for a used Chevette. Give me a wiki, and despite all best intentions, I’ll start typing help pages or encyclopedic rubbish.

  4. Steven Egan says:

    So, are these cool plug-ins and stuff going to be made a part of the testing platform for the institutions interested in the WPMu stuff? You know why I’m asking.

    @ken It depend on who you have creating the wiki, and the goals. I suspect it’s just a case of public resources being more public and open than other wiki uses.

  5. Reverend says:

    @Ron,
    How did i know you’d know. Now help a brother out and let me know where exactly I would put that snippet in wp-login.php. Is there a specific line of code I need to append this to, or am I just totally ignorant?

    @Gardner,
    I couldn;t agree with you more about CUNY, and my short time there was inspiring. In fact, much of what I talked about with several folks was your time at the Baruch Symposium. You made a deep impression, and I think that all this stuff comes full circle when we start to re-imagine it in terms of the mission of a public, under-funded educational monolith like CUNY. More to the MediWiki point, I think this first integration may actually be key in developing out the wiki farm so that any instructor or student can get a mediawiki space as something they can maintain and control while at the same time allowing for a general purpose and wide open wiki for anyone in the UMW Blogs community. it has been a long time coming, but we may finally be able to devote the necessary time and attention this Summer. Here’s to hoping.

    @Ken,
    I agree about wikis, I ahve been avoiding them more and more these days, and I am trying to re-imagine that. I have been thinking more and more that wikis are great for one or a ton of users, but not for a small group, but Steve Greenlaw in the Economics department at UMW still uses wikis to great effect, as does Jeff McClurken—so I think it is high time to get over my prejudices and try to make MediaWiki work more fluidly. That’s the crazy thing about this stuff, we can actually set out and make it work for us! Congratulations, btw, just read your blog, papi!

    @Steven,
    Yeah, this stuff is coming out incrementally, and I think this is the first of many plugins from CUNY, and I’ll be blogging anything they throw out there. Their work at the Academic Commons, as well as Blogs@Baruch and the Macaulay Honors college opens up some real development and integration possibilities given the scale they could be working on, and that is exciting, and will certainly feed into EDUBACON 🙂

  6. Matt says:

    Thanks so much for pimping this plugin, Jim. This is the first time I’ve been part of an effort that has resulted in code being released to the wider open-source community, and I have to say that it feels amazing to give something back.

    Although this single sign-on is important, I think we need a couple more steps to really reach “wiki farm” status. Ideally, every individual and group in a WPMu install would be able to have his or her own wiki space that, rather than living inside of the mediawiki install, gets imported back into the BuddyPress profile space (perhaps through the bliki work that you guys have done here at UMW). That, I think, is one of the next steps we’re going to try to take at the Commons — rethinking how groups, for instance, can create their own spaces (including discussion boards, blogs, etc.). We really want to rethink/rework the group interface; allowing each group to have its own wiki (perhaps defined via mediawiki’s category functionality) will be a major step there.

    At any rate, thanks again for everything. And, yes, both Gardner’s symposium workshop and your CUNY WordCampEd are already the stuff of legend!!

Leave a Reply to Reverend Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.