[pmwiki-users] The New AuthUser

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 03:16:17PM -0500, The Editor wrote:
> I thought I remember seeing a notice here that there would be some
> revisions to the AuthUser script in the new release which would allow
> members to create their own accounts.  Is that available yet, and is
> there any documentation for it?

No, it's not available yet; my intention was that self-creating
accounts would probably come sometime after the 2.1.0 release.

Just as a reminder to people about how I do release numbers:
PmWiki's release numbers aren't tied to the addition of new features,
they're tied to the potential difficulty of upgrading.  
A minor release (e.g., 2.1.4 to 2.1.5) means that an upgrade
can be performed without much thought, a major release
(e.g., 2.0.13 to 2.1.0) means to be sure to check the release
notes fairly thoroughly before performing the upgrade.

In particular, a minor release does not mean that no new
features have been added.  For example, the '.linkindex'
capability used to speed up searches and categories was a 
major feature addition to PmWiki, but only warranted a 
minor release number (2.0.4) because it wasn't likely to
pose any upgrade hassles for people.

So, just because a feature didn't appear in 2.1.0 doesn't
mean you're going to have to wait for 2.2.0 to see it.  
In the case of blogging support and self-registration, it
just means that I'm pretty sure we'll be able to add those
capabilities to PmWiki without requiring a major upgrade
hassle for existing sites.  In contrast, many of the features
that were added in the 2.1.beta series -- page variables,
whitespace indents, web feeds, authorization groups in AuthUser,
pagelist templates, etc. -- were all things that had a stronger
potential to break existing sites, and so could not be
done as a normal upgrade and needed to happen under a 
"beta -- not everything might work" umbrella.

> This is one of the last bridges I need to cross before I can finally
> launch my site.  Haven't found a satisfactory solution yet. 

Let me just say that user self-registration systems are a
real pain to write and get to work properly, which is one
of the reasons I haven't implemented one yet.  (Also, none of
my sites need user registration, or even use AuthUser. :-)

> Second is there a simple way to limit edit privilieges on a page in
> some group to when the user's $AuthId = $Name of page. (i.e., so
> people can only edit their own profile page for example).

I've thought about this for some time but haven't come up
with a formula I really like for doing this.  Part of the
issue is that PmWiki really doesn't have a concept of
"page ownership".

> Oh, and while I am asking, do I need both these lines in my config.php
> file?  Somehow I ended up with both.
> 
> $AuthUser['htpasswd'] = '../local/.htpasswd';
> $HtpasswdFile = '../local/.htpasswd';

PmWiki's authuser.php script only needs the first.

Pm