OAuth 2 WordPress plugin

[Martijn Rammeloo 11]

Hi,

 

We (Dutch VACC) currently use Blaatschaap on our WP site.

 

I understand that the new VATSIM SSO uses OAuth 2, rendering Blaatschaap useless.

 

Does anyone have an idea about a proper alternative?

 

Kind regards,

 

Martijn

[Ernesto Martinez 8]

Any updates on this? We have 8 Wordpress sites in the division. 

Edited April 27, 2020 by Ernesto Martinez

[Nick Harasym 7]

Any wordpress plugin that offers oauth2 for auth should be able to be configured to work with auth.vatsim.net

[Jamie Janssen 8]

In the mean time I have build my own Plugin as Oauth2 plugins are not widely available for WordPress.

Thanks!

Edited May 26, 2020 by Jamie Janssen

[Nestor Perez 83]

Feel like sharing it with the community maybe @Jamie Janssen? Maybe we can upload it to the Network Github for everyone to use? 🙂

[Jamie Janssen 8]

I would like to, but for now I run into a small problem: we get an SSL error, 2 times a day on avarage, on the 'old' SSO as well. I keep a seperate logfile if it occurs.
The error:

cURL error 35: Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to auth.vatsim.net:443

Maybe I need to contact you directly @Nestor Perez about this. It happens during Token exchange. A simple refresh (pounding F5) solves the issue, but this one is a bit strange.

Again it occurs twice a day, very random.

Sharing is caring: our plugin is very custom. I have incorporated a few Dutch VACC specific checks like 'is the user a DV member', but I could clean out the stuff and share it on the GIT.

Edited June 12, 2020 by Jamie Janssen

[Nestor Perez 83]

Uhhhh, that's a weird one... gonna play the "nothing to do with me" card and pass it on to the server guys 😛
@Nick Harasym , see above 🙂

[Steven Fauconnier 0]

Any updates?

[Nick Harasym 0]

Hey there!

Is this happening around the same time each day? This is the first report of it and I've never ran into it myself.

[Jamie Janssen 8]

Hi @Nick Harasym, i'm logging these errors and it miraculously stopped after the 12th of june this year. Maybe an (local) update resolved this issue? I update our server on a regularly basis.

At everyone else: I have made a very extensive plugin, fully integrates into our Wordpress website and assigns various roles based on the user's Vatsim status. Not quite suitable to release into the wild, but I'm willing to clean up the code and provide it on Gitlab.

[Nick Harasym 0]

@Jamie Janssen Great to hear it stopped happening. I can't remember a specific change around that time that could have resolved this issue. Last major change was https://network-status.vatsim.net/incidents/29459

Let us know if it comes back.

[Owen Kane 0]

@Jamie Janssen Any further progress or information on releasing your WP Plugin in the wild? 

If not @Nick Harasym or @Nestor Perez would VATSIM  be in a position to reccomend an oAuth 2.0 WP Plugin or work with us to slect one that would work?.

Thank You

[James Pudney 1000702 3]

I appreciate this thread hasn't been used in awhile, but as above has anyone successfully implemented the new VATSIM connect into Wordpress? If so what oAuth 2.0 plugin did you use?

I've tried a couple but they don't seem to work very well or at all. 

Thanks,

James

[Owen Kane 0]

@James Pudney 1000702 I too have tried several and none seem to work. Waiting for answer, in the meantime I might have to drop VATSIM SSO as our current SSO plugin is more than 5 years old with no development and is not compatable with one of our wordpress plugins that I need to upgrade. Hoping for an answer.

[Nestor Perez 83]

On 9/12/2020 at 2:45 PM, Owen Kane said:

If not @Nick Harasym or @Nestor Perez would VATSIM  be in a position to reccomend an oAuth 2.0 WP Plugin or work with us to slect one that would work?.

I unfortunately have zero experience with Wordpress, and believe this is the case for most -if not all- people in our team, so not sure if anyone in the team can really point you in the right direction.

What issues are you guys facing exactly? Is there no generic OAuth2 plugins? Do they not work? If not, why don't they?

Edited October 6, 2020 by Nestor Perez

[James Pudney 1000702 3]

Hi,

I think some of the standard OAuth2 plugins are just poorly built and don't support this type of function - I got one functioning but it would never once authenticated redirect back to the page I specified. I think this is purely because they don't allow you to specify endpoints etc.

I have now managed to implement OAuth Single Sign On - SSO (OAuth Client)

This works just fine, the only problem is the freeware version only allows unto 10 auto registrations per site, but you can manually add the CID to username within WordPress and it allows your user to authenticate without auto register and it authenticates between website and auth.vatsim.net just fine. 

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks,

James

[Jamie Janssen 8]

HI all, sorry my Vatsim + notification e-mails go straight to the Junk box for some reason. Haven't got to it yet. The code however is quite simpel and clean, only about a hundred lines of code. Not more. I'm not a Wordpress Plugin coder, but managed to build one. Probably not according standards, but ours works very well now.

Bare with me please...

[Joseph Pentz 1]

On 10/6/2020 at 4:43 AM, James Pudney 1000702 said:

Hi,

I think some of the standard OAuth2 plugins are just poorly built and don't support this type of function - I got one functioning but it would never once authenticated redirect back to the page I specified. I think this is purely because they don't allow you to specify endpoints etc.

I have now managed to implement OAuth Single Sign On - SSO (OAuth Client)

This works just fine, the only problem is the freeware version only allows unto 10 auto registrations per site, but you can manually add the CID to username within WordPress and it allows your user to authenticate without auto register and it authenticates between website and auth.vatsim.net just fine. 

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks,

James

James,

I've installed the same plugin, assuming from miniOrange, the developer. I still have to apply for my VATSIM OAuth cert once my site is complete as I am just running it on a backend right now so can't configure till I have that complete along with my SSL. My question is can you elaborate on how you are manually adding the CID past 10 auto registrations? Are you using the free attribute mapping and creating a custom field within the Wordpress Users? If you could elaborate on how you made this work, i'd really appreciate it!

Joe

[James Pudney 1000702 3]

Hi Joe,

Are you using Wordpress? If so you'll have to do a import of the CID you want of your site onto the "users" section of the wordpress dashboard. 

It's a heavy manual task but we're finding at VATCAR this way of implementing the SSO and using it with MiniOrange is working okay. Ideally we'd like a more robust option but for now whilst we work on other things it suits.

Let me know if you need any help.

Thanks,

James

[Joseph Pentz 1]

On 11/23/2020 at 7:51 AM, James Pudney 1000702 said:

Hi Joe,

Are you using Wordpress? If so you'll have to do a import of the CID you want of your site onto the "users" section of the wordpress dashboard. 

It's a heavy manual task but we're finding at VATCAR this way of implementing the SSO and using it with MiniOrange is working okay. Ideally we'd like a more robust option but for now whilst we work on other things it suits.

Let me know if you need any help.

Thanks,

James

James would you mind if I emailed you, I'm having trouble implementing the miniOrange SSO and not sure what I have wrong

[Joseph Pentz 1]

10 minutes ago, Joseph Pentz said:

James would you mind if I emailed you, I'm having trouble implementing the miniOrange SSO and not sure what I have wrong

Disregard - I'm an idiot and forgot to enter in my IP into the VATSIM dashboard to access the API.

[Jamie Janssen 8]

On 9/12/2020 at 2:45 PM, Owen Kane said:

@Jamie Janssen Any further progress or information on releasing your WP Plugin in the wild? 

If not @Nick Harasym or @Nestor Perez would VATSIM  be in a position to reccomend an oAuth 2.0 WP Plugin or work with us to slect one that would work?.

Thank You

Finally found some time to dive into this. Time was very precious lately. Would you be able to test it for me @Owen Kane? My plan is to share my plugin on Gitlabs, or maybe @Nestor Perez has a place to share it?
As we made some early decisions during our migration from Joomla to WP, we where able to start with SSO from the beginning. If you already have some users in your WP database, things might get nasty.

Edit: if someone else wants to join in, feel free to do so. I expect you to have some knowledge of PHP. My plugin is very basic on the Admin side. The config and setup takes place inside the code, which is btw very small and readable. With enough PHP knowledge you would be able to extend it to your needs.
That is why we haven't shared it to the community yet. Our goal was to switch to oAuth2, not to build a shiny fancy plugin 🙂

Edited December 3, 2020 by Jamie Janssen

[Nestor Perez 83]

Hey Jamie, could you join the Dev Discord announced in the latest Tech Blog post and reach out to us through there, please?

Edited December 4, 2020 by Nestor Perez
Typo

[Joseph Pentz 1]

@Jamie Janssen I would be interested in checking out your plugin. I am still building my website and I was able to get miniOrange oAuth to work with VATSIM auth but unless I'm going to shell out $350 for unlimited registrations and correct information and profile field mapping, I'd like to find an alternate solution. I know enough about working with php to be able to google my way around situations and make it work but by no means am a master at it. I view myself as more the 'make it work' and rely on stackOverflow to give you answers.

[Joseph Pentz 1]

@James Pudney 1000702 I went over to the VATCAR website to see how your auth was working and after authentication I noticed it did autopopulate most of my information in the 'Application' section of the website including rating, country, name etc. How are you managing to do that if you aren't using the payware version of miniOrange?

Essentially if I have to make it a manual process I will but i'm curious how you are importing all the information manually into your users database when miniOrange won't automatically do it. Is there a page which is providing you all the rest of the information of the user just not importing it? I still have my 10 free autoregistrations so I may be missing the limitation as I haven't hit it yet. 

Mapping the attributes is key for me on my site and the easier I can do it the better. Appreciate the help!