For our pilot run of WordPress MU for Utah Valley University we have installed and configured the WPMU LDAP plug-in to control user registration–basically syncing student/faculty/staff accounts with our Banner student information system. That’s a small tale in itself, but the short of it is Paul Nuffer and I had it working successfully after just a couple of hours. Or so we thought.
This week students reported receiving this error:
ERROR: is already associated with another account. All accounts (including the admin account) must have an unique email address.
There’s obviously something missing from this error–the identifying/offending e-mail address! It turns out that though all students actually have a UVU-provided e-mail address, only staff/faculty addresses are sent through to LDAP. Since WPMU requires a unique e-mail address, this was a big problem. Thankfully it has a small and simple solution.
For our needs I found it easiest simply to modify WPMU LDAP (ldap_ro.php) to concatenate an e-mail address from the provided LDAP information if one was not already provided.
Paul Bearne on the WPMU LDAP list suggested a more holistic solution that is equally simple: prompt users to enter an e-mail address through a form field if LDAP does not provide one. I’m guessing Paul B. is going to script this into the plugin, but if not that’s a good task for me for some rainy Saturday, and another fine chance to give back just a little to the WPMU community that I ♥.
