The Social Login plugins

Akeeba Social Login uses a number of Joomla! plugins in the sociallogin folder to implement the actual social login integrations. This makes it a very extensible and powerful solution. Its open API allows everyone to write custom login integration plugins to implement bespoke user authentication methods without having to wait for or pay the vendor (us) to implement support.

Watch out for the plugin access

All of the plugins must be published with their Access set to Public. The only exception is if you have special user groups for non-logged-in users which are applied dynamically e.g. when a user accepts cookies on your site. If you have no idea what that means it does not apply to you.

If you'd choose Guest then logged in users would be unable to link / unlink their accounts.

If you'd choose any other Access option other than Public or Guest the login buttons would never appear. That would happen because you asked Joomla! to not load the plugins that show the login buttons unless the user is already logged in. But if the user is already logged in then the login buttons are never shown.

If you felt offended by this explanation of the obvious please do understand that “obvious” is a term relative to your experience. We had to answer questions regarding this “obvious” point way too many times to consider it universally “obvious”.

Third party extension conflicts

If you have a third party extension (typically: a security extension) which is triggered by failed logins you may experience errors when a user tries to log in with a social network account which isn't already linked to a user account. Disable failed login detection on your third party extension to fix this issue. This is not a bug in Social Login. It's how Joomla works. Social Login uses the standard Joomla API to log users in. If a user login fails Joomla triggers a "failed login" plugin event. This is what is caught by security plugins

If you are using Admin Tools Professional from our company (Akeeba Ltd) we recommend that you go to Extensions, Admin Tools, Web Application Firewall, Configure WAF, Joomla! Feature Hardening Options and set Treat failed logins as security exceptions to No. Moreover, if you are trying to log in as a Super User you will of course also need to set Forbid frontend Super Administrator login to No.

You may also have third party user plugins which get in the way. Typically, these plugins assume that the only way a user may possibly log in is with a username and password. They will crash and burn when a user logs in a different way, be it Social Login or even Joomla's core Remember Me / Cookie Authentication plugins. This is clearly not a bug in our software. Hint: talk to the developers of these plugins, they need to fix them!

Included plugins

Please check the sidebar on this wiki.