[pmwiki-users] help for self-registration and other support

[Swift, Chris]

Dear all,
 
I am in dire need of help/advice, so if you have any advice, please
help.
 
I am a teacher trying to bring this technology to my educational
institution, however I'm lacking in 3 areas in order to present
something that I would get accepted in our system (of over 100,000
students).
 
1.  I need a strong self-registration system.  I tried using ZAP (member
management) and Presence Awareness, however with both of these recipes I
ended up having to start over.  Regarding both of these recipes.  Is
anyone still using ZAP?  If so, could you let me know if I could contact
you with ZAP specific questions?  Also, with Presence Awareness, there
are a lot of problems with the technology as I can register without
having to put more than a user-name and password, however in my system I
need an elaborate amount of detail on students (e-mail, address, phone
number, etc.).  Has anyone updated this recipe and are willing to share
with me their updated version?  Or would someone recommend to me a
different recipe, if so, how do you use it?   Sorry, but I need some
detail on this. 
 
2.  I need something that will show the presence of people on the
wikisite and will allow people to instant message another.  I noticed
ZAP allowed this capability, but as I mentioned the program didn't work
for me and I found the ZAP site to be more confusing then to explain
things to a real newb as me (brings me to my point if someone could let
me know if they would be willing to consult me on its usage).  I found
Presence Awareness to almost give this, but the xajax application slowed
down my server and there wasn't any way I could find to instant message
the people on my site.  I did find that PM posted that you can put
(:presence:) and it would show the authors on your site, but again there
are no IM capabilities.  Does someone have a suggestion here?
 
3.  I would like to make my site as user friendly as possible, because
it will touch on a huge variety of people (kids from 4 years old until
adults of 65!).  So, I was hoping there would be some sort of recipe
that would allow me to make my custom templates more user friendly for
people that have less technical skills than a lizard.  ;-)   So, the
concept would be that a template would show up for someone to fill in
the information into, however it wouldn't show up in text format as it
does when you click on "edit" but it would show some boxes where people
could just fill in information quite easily.
 
Thank you to everyone for your help and suggestions.  Any help will help
me out greatly.
 
Thanks,
 
Chris 
 
 
 
 
 
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