Joomla! Documentation™

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a protocol designed to access directory systems over TCP/IP. Because of this various databases provide an LDAP interface such as Microsoft's Active Directory, Novell's eDirectory, as well as more dedicated LDAP solutions such as OpenLDAP.

Joomla! has had a native LDAP library, JLDAP () and JClientLDAP (changed to JClientLDAP in ) and a native LDAP authentication plugin. This allows Joomla! to authenticate against LDAP systems out of the box: to configure, go to the Plugin Manager and enable and edit the Authentication - LDAP plugin.

You can also read a tutorial on getting started from scratch with LDAP.