The long pause between posts is not entirely my fault. In the past days there have been also some (a lot) of hardware related problems on the server that my site is running on … I think there have been at least two migrations … or was the second one an upgrade … well it does not matter.

The other reason was that I have been EXTREMELY busy because I had to set up a webpage system for [http://vicos.fri.uni-lj.si our lab]. Not just some static webpages … a big system with personal webpages for individual members and projects. Plus Wiki (Trac) and SVN.

I like to make things as integrated and polished as possible. Thats why I have decided to install [http://mu.wordpress.org/ Wordpress MU] – a multi user, multi blog version of Wordpress. It required some hacks (most of them in form of plugins) to make it usable but now it looks pretty OK. In the process I have written some plugins that I plan to release to the public when they will be mature (but I really should not promise too much because I still have some LaTeX stuff waiting to be published).

Anyway, one of the things that I am most proud of in this configuration is that users need only one account for accessing Wordpress, Trac and SVN. Configuring Tarc and SVN to use the same accounts is pretty easy as they both use Apache basic authentication. Convincing them to work with Wordpress users requires more effort. The first thing that you need is mod_auth_mysql installed and enabled. Then this Apache configuration snippet may be useful:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "<Auth name>"
AuthUserFile /dev/null # required ... some sort of bugfix
AuthGroupFile <group file>
AuthBasicAuthoritative Off
AuthMySQL On
AuthMySQL_Authoritative On
AuthMySQL_Host localhost
AuthMySQL_User <user>
AuthMySQL_Password <password>
AuthMySQL_DB <database>
AuthMySQL_Password_Table wp_users
AuthMySQL_Username_Field user_login
AuthMySQL_Password_Field user_pass
AuthMySQL_Encryption_Types PHP_MD5
AuthMySQL_Empty_Passwords Off
AuthMySQL_Encrypted_Passwords On
AuthMySQL_Group_Table wp_users # workaround
AuthMySQL_Group_Field display_name # workaround
Require group <the group> / can also be valid-user or a list of users

I still did not manage to get groups working using the database. For that a configuration file is still needed.

The benefits of this configuration is that users have only one account, that they can change their password and that it is supposed to be a bit faster than text file based storage.

Well … thats all for now. Oh, btw: the ViCoS site that you see now is still the old one. I will write when the new one will go public :)