After a hiatus, I return! … with less-than-stellar news.

The WPMU-LDAP Authentication plugin is, unfortunately, incompatible with WPMU 1.2.5a. I haven’t spent time with WPMU recently, so I missed the release of the new version.

The plugin architecture changed (accidentally, apparently), and so the LDAP Auth plugin no longer can employ the fairly trivial hack to /mu-plugins/pluggable.php it used before. The text of the original news at our SourceForge project is here:

As most people probably know at this point, WPMU 1.2.5a is *incompatible* with the LDAP Authentication plugin. This is unfortunate, but hopefully we’ll be able to address the issue soon.

For the technically minded:
The problem lies in changes made to WPMU in its plugin architecture, specifically with the removal of the mu-plugins.php/pluggable.php file. The code for that was merged into wp-includes/wpmu-functions.php, which causes problems with overriding the wp_login method. I’ve entered a ticket to address this, hopefully, into Trac for WPMU. You can see it here: http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/ticket/439. If you’re at all interested in this project, and want to continue using LDAP Authentication (without lots and lots of core hacks), please consider posting a comment in support of the change requested by the ticket.

Fortunately, donncha was quick to respond with a fix, and I wrote an update news item at SF.net:

There’s been an update. Donncha has restored the pluggable.php code with the recent merge of WP 2.3 code. So the next release should fix things. See http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/changeset/1069.

If you’d like to use this plugin with WPMU 1.2.5a, then you will need to employ a hack to wpmu-functions.php to extract the pluggable.php code.

I wish it were done in a separate, pre-WP 2.3 checkin, so that we could just update to that version, but alas, it was not meant to be.

I think the hack to get everything working again is still pretty trivial, we just now have two core hacks to make the plugin work with WPMU.

1. Modify /wp-includes/wpmu-functions.php to remove the code that was previously in pluggable.php. That’s lines 1862 through 2017.
2. Recreate pluggable.php as it is packaged with this plugin.

I need to test it out, but I’m pretty sure that this will work.

-sean

I’ve been awfully busy recently at work, and unfortunately, basically none of my time there has been focused on the WPMU LDAP plugin.  I’ve gotten a few requests that came to my inbox, and even some people that have contributed patches (thanks!)… I just haven’t found time to take a look at them.

Things should be slowing down soon-ish, so maybe I can find some extra time to update the plugin and add / merge some of the features that are strongly needed (secure LDAP for instance).  My current goal is to release a new version on September 15th.

-sean