Building a bridge between Joomla and eGroupware

Question

I'm looking to build an integrated login and user management system between Joomla and eGroupware, ideally with Joomla as the driver. That is, users would log in to Joomla and have their credentials passed into eGroupware as well, so that they could follow a link over to eGW and not have to log in again. Also administrators could add new users to Joomla (or update existing user info) and have those changes reflected in eGW as well.

I tried out this component but all I could get it to do was to synchronize passwords between existing users of both systems (matching on their usernames). Documentation is in Portuguese so I might have missed something in translation. Also I've checked out JFusion but it as yet has nothing available for a bridge to eGW.

Any general advice on how to proceed is greatly appreciated. I have some Joomla experience but not much at writing extensions/modules; would it be easier for me to try to adapt JFusion or something like that or to write something myself?

Answer 1

The best approach would be to write two Joomla plugins: one of the authentication type that will create the session in eGW when someone logs into Joomla, then one of the user type that will respond to the onAfterStoreUser event and update the profile in eGW. This way, you won't be hacking either Joomla or eGW. There's a tutorial on creating authentication plugins for Joomla here: http://docs.joomla.org/Tutorial:Creating_an_Authentication_Plugin_for_Joomla_1.5 Creating a user plugin will be a similar process, only you'll be responding to the onAfterStoreUser event.