Fantastiblog

After a long session going around in circles, I think I have cracked this particular nut!

Yes indeed – I now have been able to create accounts on a Wordpress site, hook those accounts up to use a GAFYD as OpenID to log in to Wordpress using the same credentials as the email hosted at Google (under a custom domain.)

Phew.

How does it work? I’m glad I asked!

The key part of the puzzle was to use the Janrain Wordpress plugin that uses RPX discovery. Yeah, ‘RPX discovery’ sounds like gibberish but it is really important. Google have created their own discovery mechanism (read about it from the creator of the WP OpenID plugin) which just makes things just a little more difficult from our point of view.

In any case, once the RPX plugin is installed it will prompt you to create an account at http://rpxnow.com/ which is both painless and takes only seconds.

Next we will have to manually set the users up in Wordpress. So create your new Wordpress user, make a password (and yes, you do still need a strong password here because it remains a way to login to your Wordpress site for the users.) I chose not to email the password out to the user, as the goal here is to present a single sign on solution.

Moving along – log yourself out of Wordpress and log back in as the new user you just created. Navigate to the Profile panel for that user in the Administration area. The URL will be something like http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/profile.php Down the bottom of that screen you’ll see an area to select a Sign-in Provider. The key is to select OpenID, then enter the base URL for your domain that is active at Google apps. So you would type http://yourdomain.com in.

Finally you’ll have to sign-in using that OpenID to create the link between this user account on your Wordpress install and the account at Google apps which is the single sign on account we want our users to use.

The first time I went around the OpenID authentication I was returned to the from page of my blog with some errros on screen. Ignoring those and going back to the /wp-admin page seems to work fine. For some reason it works out fine after that.

So there you have my solution to use the credentials of your user’s email accounts hosted by Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) to log into a Wordpress blog. Feedback is more than welcome, comments, tweaks, suggestions all. Get connecting!

P.S. A friend of mine has found a differing solution, Wordpress.com for your domain – where you host your website at Wordpress.com, still allowing Google to handle your email with GAFYD. This does not offer a single sign on, however you do get a website plus email for only $US10 per year. Great work Jodie!

Searching for VPN information for a SOHO environment was very difficult this afternoon for some reason.

Therefore I’m saving the links I’ve found here for future reference:

• Enable VPN server in OS X for remote access via iPhone, Windows, and OS X clients
• IPSecuritas “the most advanced, yet free IPSec client for Mac OS X”
• Mac Remote Desktop is as yet unreleased

That should be enough to get anyone started. Have fun!

Of these plugins to Manage Wordpress users and Google apps, the most promising sounding is of course WP Google Apps – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-apps/.

That’s the one I tested first (WP Google Apps 1.0 on Wordpress 2.8.5), with no real success. The first issue is that the plugin is nested an extra folder deep, so the automatic install won’t recognise the plugin. Once you move the files up one directory-level (from /wp-google-apps/wp-google-apps/* to /wp-google-apps/*) then Wordpress can ’see’ it.

After entering my Google apps domain on the configuration page, I logged out to test. The initial result is a server timeout when attempting to login to my blog with an account from the Google Apps domain. I tried both with the full email address and just the user name, only to have the same effect – a timeout. Checking the plugin’s sparse documentation I did note that the Google Apps account must be set to allow POP or IMAP access for this to work. A quick check showed that I did already have POP enabled. Slightly more disturbing is that the timeout persisted even when using my original credentials for the blog.

The only solution was to remove the plugin from the filesystem (I used webshell as I’m hosted on an H-Sphere control panel) – you could as easily use FTP or SSH in if you have access. Once removed (or simply compressed to save time for more attempts) I could log back in with my original administrator account.

The FAQ does note that “Unfortunately, the only way to get the plugin to work on 2.0.x is to completely wipe the dashboard.” I’m not really sure what ‘wiping the dashboard’ is though – any suggestions?

On a quest to make my Scout group’s website as simple as possible to use, I’m searching for a way to enable a single-sign-on (SSO) capability. Why you ask? So that our adult leaders and lay helpers can access both the Google Apps backend and the website with the same credentials.

Searching the Wordpress plugin repository I’ve come up with these potential solutions:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/3rd-party-authentication/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/installation/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/rpx/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-apps/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/opensso-plugin/changelog/
• http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/

Now some of those look like they would be more useful in allowing a wide range of authentication options for people just leaving comments on your blog, but some look like they’d have real potential.

If you have any experience with these I’d love to hear about it. In the meantime I’ll be working my way through these, testing which will provide the best solution for the Scout group.

UPDATES:
Testing WP Google Apps
Solved? Single sign on for Google apps and Wordpress

The amazing Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin has just been updated to enable upgrading your Wordpress installation from 2.7 to 2.7.1

This plugin really makes it easy to upgrade Wordpress, even from an old install way back at version 1.5! The author had finished development when Wordpress announced the native ability to upgrade, however this gives us hope it may work for a while yet. Great news for those who find the native update doesn’t work for them.

The renovations continue up at the main site. The latest page to get the makeover is my money maker : now titled ‘Improve Your Income.’ By small, realistic amounts is the sub-text here! Sure you could make a lot of money, but that would be the exception rather than the rule. After all, I’m still here working day-to-day and not relaxing in a tropical paradise somewhere – your mileage may vary, of course.

Well it is a start, and I’ve been using some of those sites and techniques for many years now – earning some small cash along the way. You can earn some for yourself, so take a look and perhaps join in today! There’s nothing to lose but a couple of minutes and it could be the start of something big – way down the line.

The AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin » Acme Technologies Zeitgeist is a plugin to manage placing adsense blocks into individual posts!

Nice job.

Technorati is a site that aims to index the live web, or all the fast updating content like blogs, photos, videos and so on. If you want to have some say over how your blog is presented, you can ‘claim’ it there.

When you do, they will ask you to create a post with the following link in it : Technorati Profile

Now that I have done so, Technorati will come back and spider this site. Then I’ll be in!

Check out these neat tools at http://js-kit.com/.

Simply by adding two lines to your website you can add a poll, comments or even a ratings system. The basic tools are free to use (at the moment), with adds potentially being added into the items down the track.

When you are running your own Wordpress blog on H-Sphere you will eventually want to install a new theme. What makes this interesting is that WebShell, the tool allowing file access to your H-Sphere hosting account, doesn’t appear to allow you to upload a directory (folder) from your computer. Since a Wordpress theme can contain many files (and even a few folders) this presents a sticky situation. Do you want to upload all those files 10 at a time? No? I don’t either.

What we need is a little lateral thinking. Now, if you have a static IP address you could turn on FTP and upload that way, but what if that’s not an option either? As fortune would have it, WebShell allows us to use a wonderful tool called ‘wget’, which is more or less short for ‘web get’ – a very tricky name indeed. What could it mean? Simply it allows us to grab any file that you can click to in a web browser and copy it into your WebShell. Now do you see where we are going?

The best way to get the theme in is to first navigate to your blog/wp-contents/themes directory in WebShell. Next, try to find the original URL of your theme on the web (this will usually be a .zip archive, which is great for this job.) Now use the ‘WGET’ button that you see at the bottom of the WebShell page. Just paste in the URL of the theme’s archive, click ‘get’ and wait. Once your theme has been transferred to your WebShell, click on it once and then use the ‘uncompress’ button to, well, uncompress the archive. Now your theme will be ready to use.

What if you cannot find a nice link to the archive?

Sometimes the download link is obscured behind a link like this :
http://themes.wordpress.net/download.php?theme=2575
and WebShell will only get you a file like ‘download.php’ – which isn’t very helpful.

Fear not! This is where your ISP’s free web hosting space comes in handy. Remember that? Most ISP’s do provide you with free web space on their site, usually something like : ‘members.ispname.com/yourname’ go and check now, you probably do have it available.

Now that you have your free web space ready, upload the archive there and go back to the previous step. This time, however, replace the original URL of the theme archive with the URL to the archive in your account at your ISP. Easy.