bookmark_borderEleusis Password App for Horde3 now in OpenSUSE

The Eleusis Password App by Andre Pawlowski allows keeping passwords and login credentials in a secure way. Encrypted storage and enforced HTTPS transfer provide a secure environment for you to store all those passwords you cannot remember but would never dare to write down. Other than your laptop’s password safe, Eleusis is always there for you anywhere you can get a secure web access, be it your phone, PDA or guest login on a public terminal.

Eleusis password decrypting screen

Eleusis is based on the Horde 3 Framework and can easily be integrated into your existing Horde Webmail or Horde Groupware. To make installation even more convenient, I packaged Eleusis for SLES and OpenSUSE in the Build Service repository server:php:applications. Click here for download

bookmark_borderHorde 3.3.10 customizing – Patch for more flexible administration of users and groups

Horde Groupware is a great couple of end-user applications with a lot of flexibility. It supports many different sources or backends for retrieving authorized users and putting them into groups which have access to some resources like calendars, address books or inventory lists. Horde includes a GUI for editing users and groups if the backend supports it. The GUI is accessible only to those users which have the global administrator privilege set in the conf.php configuration file. Users with this flag can access all administrative options like the SQL shell, the configuration editor and the permission tree. This is usually not what you want. Administrators want to delegate tedious user and group management to moderators or managers, but they do not want to enable these people to make harmful changes to the general application setup. Even worse, administrator users always see all applications, even those not properly setup for usage. There’s no way to disable that.

To fix this, I have provided a patch against horde 3.3.10 which allows more flexible administration permissions. You can now allow certain users to access only some administration screens like the users screen or the groups screen while not allowing them access to the permissions editor at the same time. These users will be presented only the administrative links which they have access to. Technically, they don’t get the isAdmin flag, so they don’t need to view everything a full administrator can see. I used the horde permissions system to implement access management, after Jan Schneider suggested this move instead of writing a full “account management module”. There is no feedback yet if this patch will make it into mainstream horde3 but I will use it on some horde installations.

bookmark_borderHorde Updates: Base module 3.3.10 RPMs for SLES and OpenSUSE

New Horde Version available as OpenSUSE package

Horde just released version 3.3.10 of their base application along with some minor updates to imp and dimp. After 3.3.9 had some regressions that caused trouble editing preferences, I decided to upgrade the horde RPMs for OpenSUSE and SLES 11 to the new release. This also removed the dependency on PHP versions lower than 5.3 as the package is now working with the default openSUSE 11.3 php package.

Splitting  into vanilla horde and Kolab patched version

Releases of the horde rpm and some application packages contained some dated patches for working together with the Kolab groupware server. I asked upstream Kolab author Gunnar Wrobel and he suggest a clean split between a standard and a kolab version of the horde package. Beginning with the next updates of the package I will implement this split offering two conflicting versions.

Turba LDAP driver patch

The LDAP backend driver for the Turba Contact Manager makes some optimistic assumptions on the privileges (ACLs) 0f the binding LDAP user. By default, it assumes it can add new contacts (which is not true for typical company addressbooks) and if you have ACLs to only some attributes of an entry, for example your own work phone but not your name or job title, Turba tries to write the whole entry.
I submitted a patch for the Turba LDAP driver which makes Turba only try to write attributes which have actually changed.

bookmark_borderHorde 3.3.9 SLES 11SP1 and OpenSUSE RPMs

Horde has been in Suse Linux for many years, but recently the packages were outdated, some even missing.

I have taken over the horde packages in the OpenSUSE and SLES 11 PHP applications repository.  Currently Horde has been updated to 3.3.9, but also mimp, mnemo, turba, and kronolith have been updated to recent versions. The dynamic ajax webmail interface dimp and the file manager gollem have been added as new packages in their current version.

While I am actively testing and using these packages, these packages come with no sort of guarantee.

The packages have a dependency on PHP < 5.3 as there are some known issues with horde 3.3.9 Alarms under PHP 5.3. While SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 comes with PHP 5.2, users of OpenSUSE 11.3 need to get PHP < 5.3 from another repository. I am currently trying to find out if I can easily patch this to work with PHP 5.3 and up.

One note for new users: These packages do not install mysql, php-mysql or the  php5-pear-mdb2_driver_mysqli package, which you probably want to install when using horde with mysql.

Stay tuned for more packaged horde apps, framework components and patches.

bookmark_borderHorde DIMP Portal: Let Dimp use classic Horde Portal settings

When you use DIMP, the AJAX frontend to Horde Groupware‘s widely used IMP webmailer, you usually want to hide the classic horde sidebar and the horde portal itself. Though DIMP provides its own portal page to display Horde Blocks, it does not provide any configuration tool for them but provides one static set for all users. One way around this is to make use of the user’s existing classic Horde Portal settings. This is how it works: Edit dimp/config/portal.php and add the following lines:

$horde_portal_layout = @unserialize($prefs->getValue(‘portal_layout’));
/* Format is
[row]
[column] empty or array app
[column]
[app] (string registry app identifier)
[height] (integer rows)
[width] (integer columns)
[params] (array)
[type] string block type identifier
[params] array, specific to block type*/

foreach ($horde_portal_layout as $horde_portal_row) {
foreach ($horde_portal_row as $item) {
if (is_array($item)) {
$dimp_block_list[$collection->getName($item[‘app’], $item[‘params’][‘type’] )] = array( ‘ob’ => $collection->getBlock( $item[‘app’], $item[‘params’][‘type’], $item[‘params’][‘params’] ) );
}
}

This is only a first approach to a complete solution. Dimp allows to add a specific DOM ID to every single block and to load specific JavaScript or template markup. In the default configuration, some blocks like the Ingo Filter’s overview block look odd in dimp portal, which was not in mind when they were originally designed.

Do you need site-specific horde hacks, setups, modules or improvements? Ask B1 Systems GmbH for consulting and development.

bookmark_borderHorde 3.3.5 to 3.3.6 migration patch broken? Alternative Patch!

If you want to patch a Horde 3.3.5 installation pulled from  the official Horde 3.3.5 tarball
using the  official Horde 3.3.6 patch you will notice a lot of patch rejects, which render the patch file essentially broken.

Reason:

The patch assumes that version identifier strings of both 3.3.5 and 3.3.6 use
the dash format for dates like 2009-01-06. The 3.3.5 files shipped with the
horde-3.3.5.tar.gz file use slash format like 2009/01/06 15:22:10.

Horde developer Michael Rubinsky stated on the developer mailing list that this happened when horde repositories moved to a new server with a different version of CVS. Future version upgrades will not be affected by this problem.

When Michael answered, I already made my own patch (click here to download) from 3.3.5 to 3.3.6 which works with the real tarballs.

Users of a 3.3.5 version CVS checkout be warned. Don’t use this patch. Use the official Horde 3.3.6 patch instead.

bookmark_borderHorde Webmail 1.1.2 und Horde Groupware 1.1.2 veröffentlicht.

Das Horde-Projekt hat heute die neue Version 1.1.2 des Horde-Webmail-Paketes und des Groupware-Paketes veröffentlicht.

Das Paket Horde Webmail besteht neben einer Horde-Basisinstallation aus dem Webmailer IMP, dem Email-Filter Ingo, dem Kalender Kronolith, dem Adressbuch Turba, dem Task-Manager Nag und dem Notizblock Mnemo.

Gegenüber Horde Webmail Version 1.1.1 wurde vor allem die Update-Fähigkeit des Setup-Scripts und der SQL-Treiber verbessert. Standardmäßig ist jetzt auch ein Adressbuch mit den häufigsten Email-Empfängern aktiviert. Ein komplettes Changelog ist auch erhältlich.

Horde Groupware besteht aus einer anders vorkonfigurierten Version des Basissystems sowie den Applikationen Gollem (Datei- und FTP-Manager), Kronolith, Mnemo, Nag, Trean (Lesezeichen-Manager), und Turba. Auch hier ist ein Changelog verfügbar.

Die Applikationen der Webmail-Suite und der Groupware-Suite sowie weitere Horde-Applikationen können prinzipiell auch separat voneinander oder in anderen Kombinationen eingesetzt werden.

bookmark_borderHorde Projekt gibt Blog-Software ‘thomas’ auf

Das Horde-Projekt hat angekündigt, die bisher auch auf dieser Website benutzte Blog-Software Horde Thomas nicht weiter als eigenständiges Programm zu entwickeln. Die Funktionalität von ‘thomas’ wird sukzessive in den weiter aktiv entwickelten News- und RSS-Reader Horde ‘jonah’ integriert.