Okay.. I’m still at this Plone 2.5 upgrade thing. The early reports saying that the upgrade from Plone 2.1 to 2.5 is a snap are indeed correct. Unless you are using CAS for authentication.
Since Plone 2.5 uses PAS (Pluggable Authentication Service) which is very different than the way 2.1 handled authentication, it is necessary to do away with the old way to do CAS auth.
Begin rant ….
The single biggest complaint about the Plone/Zope community is that they think that backward compatibility is optional. They don’t think twice about breaking old code in favour of new features. Undoubtedly PAS is a superior way of handling authentication and permissions than the old way, but couldn’t they make it backwards compatible with the old way of doing things. It is ridiculous to think that every time I have to upgrade to a new version that I have to spend a week or two feeling around the bugs and bases of the code and configuration just trying to make it work again. This paragraph is written out of anger and frustration…. bahh!!
End rant …
Okay, back to rational thinking. Here is what I have done so far:
- Downloaded CAS4PAS 1.0.0-1 and installed in the Products directory.
- Restarted Zope and added a CAS Helper to the acl_users folder of my Plone site – then copied the settings across.
- Downloaded and installed the new version of PloneCASLogin (because the old version doesn’t work with PAS).
- Went to a different browser and tried to log in using CAS.
- The login button takes me to the CAS login page OK, but when I return to the Plone site, it says that there was a sign-in failure.
At this point I went back to the download pages for the Plone CAS Login and CAS4PAS products to see if I was missing anything. I noticed a patch to make it compatible with CAS 2 (not sure if my server is CAS 1 or 2, but I thought I might as well download it anyway to see if that was the problem.
- Downloaded and ran the patch
- Restarted the server and tried to log in — same problem!
- Scoured the internet for information from others having the same problem. Found one helpful post here.
- It suggested that I try to disable the “Challenge” feature of the credentials_cookie_auth in acl_users.
- Same problem!
That is where I sit right now… No clues, so I’ll dig deeper into the code and see what I can find….
Okay.. hold the phone…. it looks like the problem may be simply that the python that we are using for the Plone 2.5 install doesn’t have SSL support compiled in… but the jury is still deliberating.
So, how did this all work out? I am using CAS for the first time at a university – I am interested in your success (or not) with (what I assume is the) PloneCAS Product.
dcd