i4a Single Sign-On

The i4a SSO plugin uses the i4a SSO web service API to authenticate individuals with a user account in the i4a database. You can configure the plugin to authenticate and allow only active, non-expired members to log into your WordPress site. Or you can configure it to authenticate and allow active members, expired members and non-members to log in to your WordPress site. The SSO plugin will not authenticate staff or admin accounts.

Yes, a user will automatically be created in WordPress upon first login if they don’t exist already. The plugin does not save the user’s password in WordPress. The user will always need to sign in with their i4a credentials. Users need to navigate to the i4a-hosted website to change their passwords.

The plugin hides it by default, because your users’ passwords are stored in i4a and the WordPress reset process cannot change them. Turn on “Show Forgot Password Link” in the plugin settings to show the link and send users to the password reset page on your i4a site. While the link is on, WordPress accounts that are not linked to i4a, such as your site administrators, can still reset their WordPress password by going to wp-login.php?action=lostpassword. Developers can change the link address and wording with the i4a_sso_lostpassword_url and i4a_sso_lostpassword_text filters, and the i4a_sso_reset_password_url() function returns the reset page address for use in a theme.

As long as your WordPress site is on the same root domain as your i4a-hosted website you don’t need to do anything special to create a hyperlink to your i4a-hosted website. When a user logs into your WordPress site, the i4a SSO plugin saves a single sign-on token for the user to a cookie in their web browser. Once the user visits any page on your i4a-hosted website, the i4a-hosted website will automatically detect that single sign-on token and log the user in to the i4a-hosted website without the user needing to manually log in again.

Yes, as long as your WordPress site is on the same root domain as your i4a-hosted website. If the user has already logged in to the i4a-hosted website and they are allowed to log in based on your plugin’s member/non-member configuration settings, they will be automatically logged into the WordPress site upon their first page visit to the WordPress site. The WordPress site looks for a cookie on the shared “root domain” of the website and if that cookie is found, will use the cookie to look up the user’s information in the i4a-hosted site database and log them in to the WordPress site automatically.

Yes, each time a user logs into the WordPress site their member type and contact types will be updated to match their settings in the i4a-hosted website for all member and contact types that you have previously imported into WordPress. This means if a user was once a member and is now expired the user will no longer have the member type assigned to them as a role in WordPress. The opposite is also true. If a user was once a non-member but has since joined your association, their member type is assigned to them as a role in WordPress automatically upon their next login to the WordPress site, instantly giving them access to any member-restricted content in your WordPress site.

No, if you change or add any member or contact types in your i4a-hosted website you’ll need to run the “Import Roles” again from the SSO plugin page. If you delete any member or contact types in your i4a-hosted website you’ll need to manually remove those roles from WordPress using another third-party role management plugin.

No, non-members are only assigned a custom role of “i4a: Non-member” in WordPress and will not have the default WordPress role of “Subscriber” assigned to them. If you have not enabled Member and Contact Type sync, members are assigned a role of “Subscriber” in WordPress and you can give access to members-only content with just the “Subscriber” role. Therefore, since non-members will not have the “Subscriber” role assigned to them they will not be able to access members-only content in the WordPress site.

Yes, we offer WordPress hosting for our customers. You can find full details of how the WordPress integration and hosting works at https://www.i4a.com/ams-integrations/wordpress-association-integration/