I am building a web consisting of MediaWiki and phpBB as its subcomponents. Also WordPress may be added in future. My current problem is to choose a single unified authentication method (not to force users to have a special MediaWiki account, a special phpBB account, etc.).
Which approach would you recommend me? The basic limitation is that it is a simple LAMP server (no LDAP database). Possibilities I know about:
- Use a decentralized protocol such as OpenID, OAuth 2.0, etc. I would prefer this approach. However, OpenID is not supported by Google any more so OAuth 2.0 would be probably more appropriate.
- Use DB of users from phpBB and install some plugin to other subcomponents (MediaWiki extension for phpBB auth.)
- Use DB of users from MediaWiki and install some plugin to phpBB.
- Use some specialized web application for user credentials management and install plugins both to MediaWiki and phpBB.
I think the main point you already understand: You need one of your new platforms to be the central user store. The problem you know have to find out:
What platform has the plugins to interact with each other? It’s possible, that you find plugins, that only works “in one direction”, and for mediawiki itself you will find a log of outdated extensions, that maybe won’t work anymore with the latest mediawiki versions and updates.
The other point is, that you should think about WordPress now, too. After you selected one central user store you mostly can’t change it with a lot of work, so I would check for an integration of WordPress now, too.
Looking at that and a short search i wouldn’t prefer MediaWiki to be the central user storage, and i’m not sure, if phpBB is the best solution, too :/
I think one of the best would be to use LDAP, extensions and plugins seems to be supported and working for the latest versions of each software. You yould have a central user store, which could be easily integrated in other applications, too. What is the reason you can’t use it, an LAMP stack could handle this, too?
The second solution i would consider to choose is to use Google’s user store and access it vi OAuth 2.0. MediaWiki, phpBB and WordPress supports this with plugins and/or extensions.
At the end of the day a login is a login is a login. All the custom fields specific to individual applications can be properly bridged with plug-ins. Make the app that will require the most babysitting your main database and thus login system. In many cases it’s the forum, but that really varies by site.
I would caution that many new forum admins eventually want to upgrade from phpBB to something that’s more powerful and modern. I was one of those admins. Yes, phpBB is as good as an open-source forum gets, but it just doesn’t compete with the commercial forum apps. So keep that in mind if you make phpBB your main database.