I hope this question isn't too naive; I've just come across elgg in the last couple days, in response to a request from some faculty at my university for a locally-run community site.  Elgg looks like a great fit, as far as I can guess right now.  The open source/community/api is always my preference.

However, I'd really like to integrate with our local authentication, and I don't see any plugin that would work.  We use Shibboleth, with our local auth method called 'bluestem'.  The details don't matter, because I can install an apache module that simply populates the REMOTE_USER variable, which elgg should pick up.

My question is:  Is there such a plugin, and I'm blind?  Seems to me this would be of generic use, since many apache modules do it this way.  If not, it's ok to tell me to write one, although I'd appreciate some indication of difficulty.  (The gulf between my perl and php expertise is pretty large.)

  Bob Goldstein