LDAP control panel for Plone

Overview

plone.app.ldap provides a user interface in a Plone site to manage LDAP and Active Directory servers.

This package succeeds the simplon.plone.ldap package.

It builds on the functionality provided by LDAPMultiPlugins, LDAPUserFolder and PloneLDAP.

plone.app.ldap targets the Plone 4.x. series and may run on 5.0/5.1 (not official supported). Further on use pas.plugins.ldap.

Active Directory

Active Directory provides an LDAP interface to its data. Using this interface Plone can use both users and groups from an Active Directory system. Writing to Active Directory is not supported.

With Active Directory you can use two different properties as login name: userPrincipalName and sAMAccountName. sAMAccountName is the plain account name without any domain information and is only unique within a single domain. If your environment only uses a single AD domain this option is the best choice. For environments with multiple names the userPrincipalName attribute can be used since this includes both account name and domain information.

Since Plone does not support binary user ids it is not possible to use the objectGUID attribute as user ids. Instead you can use either sAMAccountName or userPrincipalName. The same criteria for choosing a login name also apply to selecting the user id attribute.

Newer versions of Active Directory may also work using the standard LDAP plugin, which supports limited writing to AD, including modifying group memberships. If your group objects have member attributes containing the user's full DN, the standard LDAP plugin should work for you. Note that this will not support nested groups.

Standard LDAP

LDAP directory servers are fully supported. LDAP users and groups are usable as standard Plone users and groups can be me managed normally. Creating and deleting users and groups is supported.

Installing

This package works with Plone 3 and Plone 4. Plone 3 and Plone 4.0 users should install a version in the 1.2.* series (e.g. plone.app.ldap < 1.3, the latest current release is 1.3.2), as release 1.3 will only work with Plone 4.1 or higher.

This package depends on python-ldap. In order to build it correctly you need to have some development libraries included in your system. On a typical Debian-based installation use:

sudo apt-get install python-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libssl-dev

Once the package is installed, it will be available as an add-on named "LDAP support", and this add-on can be activated in a Plone instance using the Add-ons section of the Plone Control Panel. Be careful, as this package also currently installs LDAPUserFolder as a dependency, which makes the add-on "LDAPUserFolder CMF Tools" available. Do not install this add-on! It will replace the portal_membership tool and make your Plone site unusable.

Install without buildout

First you need to install this package in the python path for your Zope instance. This can be done by installing it in either your system path packages (usually with pip or easy_install) or in the lib/python directory in your Zope instance.

After installing the package it needs to be registered in your Zope instance. This can be done by putting a plone.app.ldap-configure.zcml file in the etc/pakage-includes directory with this content:

<include package="plone.app.ldap" />

or, alternatively, you can add that line to the configure.zcml in a package or Product that is already registered.

Installing with buildout

If you are using buildout to manage your instance installing plone.app.ldap is even simpler. You can install it by adding it to the eggs line for your zope instance:

[instance]
eggs =
    ...
    plone.app.ldap

Installing the development version

To specify the current development version you may use:

[buildout]
find-links =
    ...
    http://github.com/plone/plone.app.ldap/tarball/master#egg=plone.app.ldap-dev

[instance]
eggs =
    ...
   plone.app.ldap==dev

With pip that would be this:

pip install -f http://github.com/plone/plone.app.ldap/tarball/master#egg=plone.app.ldap-dev plone.app.ldap==dev

With easy_install:

easy_install -f http://github.com/plone/plone.app.ldap/tarball/master#egg=plone.app.ldap-dev plone.app.ldap==dev

Copyright and credits

Copyright

plone.app.ldap is Copyright 2007, 2008 by the Plone Foundation. Simplon donated the simplon.plone.ldap code to the Plone Foundation.

Credits

Wichert Akkerman <wichert@simplon.biz>

Funding

CentrePoint