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Joomla CiviCRM Membership Authentication Plugin

Published
2008-07-03 07:57
Written by
speleo
If you’re running a site using Joomla you’re no doubt aware that some things which appear to be straight forward with a Drupal base aren’t so easy. Both Joomla and Drupal have their strengths and weaknesses, I just happen to be a long way down the Joomla path. A big issue for me was how do I restrict access to my site depending on memberships to a real world (non internet) organisation. All my members have an entry in the CiviCRM database but many will not have a CMS login. Out of the box there was no real way of achieving this without getting into LDAP territory. With Joomla 1.5 a number of new “tools” are available, one of which is the Authentication Plugin. Looking at the existing plugins it was clear that it would be possible to authenticate against the Joomla user table and then perform a lookup for a valid CiviCRM membership before authenticating the user. The result is a Joomla CiviCRM Membership Authentication Plugin which can be configured to authenticate against a set membership status level and which handles redirects when authentication fails. http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Joomla+CiviCRM+Membership+Authentication+Plugin While this solves one issue it also raises some more. How do I handle new registrations for people who are members of my organisation but don’t have a Joomla login yet? If a contacts membership has expired how do you handle a CiviContribute membership update? Don’t you have to be logged in? Community Builder might provide some solutions here but I’d waiting until they not ransoming the product.
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Joomla

Comments

This is great news Speleo!

I have been hoping someone would find time to develop a Joomla authentication component with the benefit of the new Joomla! 1.5 framework.

I agree that the questions this now raises in terms of membership workflows are interesting - but at least those are questions we can now start asking and we have the first rungs in the ladder now to climb!

I think new registrations should be handled with the ability to publish a CiviCRM Profile to the public as part of the authentication process for new users.

I look forward to playing with it - thanks for your contribution!!

Thanks Andrew! Lobo has already started working on getting a profile to collect contact information during joomla registration. See CRM-3191.

Wow that's so great! Thank you for doing that. Can you perhaps list this on the Joomla Extensions Directory? Also, if you want you can register it as a project on Joomlacode.

Excellent.
You say "How do I handle new registrations for people who are members of my organisation but don’t have a Joomla login yet?"

My approach will be to produce an alternative to com_user (much as lobo discusses in this http://civicrm.org/node/375 blog post based on this article.

Whereas Donald wanted to generate a Civi Contact from a Joomla registration, my problem is simpler - I already have the entire membership in CiviCRM and I want to restrict the Joomla registration to only people who have a valid CiviCRM contact (and optionally also belong to a specific group or groups).

Then members can be told that they can register on the site if they wish

This looks fairly straightforward to do, would produce a component for registration only, with your plugin to the J authentication there would be no need to also produce a replacement login module.

If no-one else has already done this I aim to start after Womud next weekend.

RogerCO