Yahoo authentication

[jeepn]

I read the great news on the dev blog that a GMail authentication plugin was created that will be released with 1.1.  The blog also mentioned a Yahoo authentication plugin.  Is that in the works?  Or is the GMail plugin supposed to be an example and a 3PD will need to create a Yahoo plugin?

Just wondering....   

[pasamio]

Heya jeepn,

At present I'm still trying to get a method at providing Yahoo authentication, if someone has any suggestions I will attempt to write one myself but until then anyone is welcome to write a Yahoo plugin. The GMail plugin uses the Atom feed to verify the username and password, so a similar method (easy to reproduce, the GMail plugin only uses a few lines of curl functions to work - and I simulated it with wget originally on a terminal) for Yahoo would be great, but any alternative is good.

So if you have any suggestions, they're welcome, or get in contact with your local 3PD and see if they have any ideas.

Sam

[jeepn]

I found this article that may help someone get started in the right direction for developing a Yahoo authentication plug-in:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/ ... ntity.html

Make sure to take a look at the comments as well on that page...

[jmeyerdo]

Hi!

Are there any news on this?

As I understand there is still no API for Yahoo/YahooGroups available. Even if there seem to be some considerations, i.e.: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006961.html.

Based on the GMail-plugin I wrote a small Yahoo-checker yesterday. When sending correct user/password with cURL to the Yahoo-Login-Page I am receiving a "1" as result (as I understand). With wrong user/password I am receiving the error-page with a new login-form from Yahoo.
So that should work as basically check if a Yahoo-account exists.

Unfortunately the serverside URL-redirection to the next page (i.e. a YahooGroups-page) is actually not working. I tried with sending all hidden and session-information with my request but it is not working. I have to try sending a second request with authenticated session in the next step.
I need this to check on the YahooGroups-page if the logged in user is a member of this group (parsing the content for specific member-strings).

Are there any hints/tipps?

Kind regards, Jens

[pasamio]

HI Jens,

If you're getting enough of a successful response then in reality that should be enough for Joomla! to continue. Once you've got confirmation you're good to go, populate the JAuthenticateResponse and return to the auth system. As you can see with the GMail I'm not so much bothered with the actual content of the document or where it goes just that something worked,

Sam

[jmeyerdo]

Hi Sam!

Thank you for your reply.
Yes - as I can see the responses (and my "interpretations") are correct. I finished the authentication-module (Yahoo-account and special YahooGroups-membership) for my needs now:

step 1: connect login-page, grab session-information (cookie and hidden-fields)
step 2: authenticate with username and passwort (check for correct yahoo-account)
step 3: open specified YahooGroups-page, grab the welcome string and parse it for username, email, role

If success I will give username and email back to Joomla. Works fine for me in general - will test this with several users soon.
Perhaps it is possible without step 1 but I have not tried this until now. Of course I have to monitor the functionality regularly (special layout-changes from Yahoo can crash my regular expressions).

Kind regards, Jens