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!

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?

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

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.

Nice job.

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.

Why not?

Okay, that’s not the best of answers. The whole Fantastic web site has been online for a very long time now, and in the early days the design was based around a little orange background graphic. For some reason I’m still feeling fond of the old colour, so in keeping with that (not so carefully chosen) theme I’m sticking with orange. For now, at least.

Enjoy!

Great to see them on top of things and it got me motivated to install a plugin to check the version of WordPress … I’ll also sign up for the upgrade mailing list

Perhaps when there are stats to see I will show some of them off. That’s right, not only do you get stats on your Dashboard, you can place them on your blog.

Fine, I’ll try to drop todays visits in here :

[nope, not working ... I'll have to dig a little first]

Also managed to edit my .htaccess file – which seemed quite hard at first!

Here in H-Sphere land we don’t allow direct shell access to accounts, which on the whole saves a great deal of grief. Occasionally we need to think outside the WebShell box, however

WebShell allows you to do all the normal tasks you might want a shell for, but in a controlled web based interface. Now, the standard way of creating a .htaccess file (and the normal reason) is to use the ‘edit .htaccess’ button (or create button) which allows you to create a list of usernames and passwords that will be allowed access to the folder in question.

However there’s no way to manually add other lines in there, like to add ‘mod_rewrite’ rules for WordPress to make nice permalinks with. So – in Settings allow all files to be seen, then use the File command to create a new .htaccess file and paste in the mod_rewrite rules that WordPress has kindly suggested. Done.