I’ve finally had a chance to play with the new version of Elgg. The first order of business was to getting LDAP working for authentication and account creation. While the interface was quite a bit different, the setup was very similar to the previous version. As an added bonus the configuration is done through the web interface without needing to edit configuration files.

Things you need:

• Running Elgg Installation
• Running LDAP Server with user information
• LDAP Browser tool (I prefer JXplorer) highly recommended

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While configuring our web filter, we realized that Apple’s default master/slave setup only allows LDAPS through the master server. This has some major limitations in regards to the usefulness of replicas. It turns out that one simple terminal command solves the problem.

sudo slapconfig -setldapconfig -ssl on -sslcert /etc/certificate/<your certificate>.crt -sslkey /etc/certificate/<your certificate>.key -ssldomain <server domain>

If there’s a way to do this through the GUI I couldn’t find it. Hope this helps somebody else out there.

As I was experimenting with Elgg and LDAP, I realized that none of the users create via LDAP authentication would so up in browse until somebody added them as a friend. Of course adding somebody who doesn’t show up in the list is a bit difficult so it was sort of a deal breaker.

It turns out that the friends able is used someway in the browse feature and users that register themselves are automatically made friends with a “0″ user that doesn’t really exist. So basically, you have to add a little code to the /auth/LDAP/lib.php and then your LDAP created users will work wonderfully.

Basically, I slightly modified a post that I found on the Elgg forums.

1. Find line 153:

$user_id = insert_record(‘users’,$user);

2. Add the following below:

// adds “virtual” friend, so that user has at least one connection, and shows up in the browse feature.
$newid = user_info_username(‘ident’, $username);
$owner = 0;
$f = new StdClass;
$f->owner = $owner;
$f->friend = $newid;
$f->status = ‘perm’;

insert_record(‘friends’,$f);

The additionally code simple grabs the new users “ident” from the User table and inserts a friend record with the shadowy “0″ user.

Now, if I can just figure out how to setup the tag cloud to work correctly.