EE and Wordpress Single Sign On

Hi all,

I find myself needing to help two NGOs connect their websites seamlessly, aka single sign on. The one is EE2, the other is Wordpress. Neither is likely to convert to the other’s platform (one just moved on to wordpress, the other works with many orgs and cannot change platforms based on one other org’s preferences). Afaik neither is currently integrating with any third party auth like Facebook, and in any case users signing up for a separate account first is a non-starter (unless this can be done programmatically on behalf of the users when they are given credentials).

It seems that what I need does not exist as a third party module, so I’m thinking through what I’ll need to do:

1. User is created in Wordpress
2. User browses Wordpress site and follows link to EE site
3. Custom EE module checks with Wordpress, is this user logged on?
4. If yes, custom module creates the user in EE if they don’t currently exist
5. Module logs the user in programmatically

Part 3 is something some wordpress code and I will have to discuss, although I’ll gladly accept anyone’s guidance about where to start on that. Part 4 and 5 are the EE trick… I believe EE APIs to do this do not exist, but it seems TankAuth for CodeIgniter will work:

http://konyukhov.com/soft/tank_auth/

… is there anything I have to do in addition to CodeIgniter auth to log users in programmatically? I’ve seen the minimum member import entry on the wiki, that should help me with the member creation part.

The other possibility I tossed around was skipping the EE member stuff and just always substitute {if logged_on} for a check with Wordpress. I’ll have new templates regardless, so I can change what the authentication does per integration. Anyone care to speculate on performance implications of a check between servers over the net in the scale of time an EE request takes to be served?

Thanks, Fritz