[pmwiki-users] A robust user registration module

[Eemeli Aro]

On 20 May 2010 15:16, Hans <design5 at softflow.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I am looking for a robust user registration module,
> by which wiki users can register by choosing a user name and
> password, submit these together with name and email address,
> and get a confirmation email sent to them automatically, which
> they need to use in order to activate a new registered user account.
> It also needs to be easily administered using forms, and to cope
> with potential thousands of users.
>
> Any ideas if this can be put together as an add-on for PmWiki?
> Has it been done?

I've faced this same problem a couple of times, and ended up writing
MailmanAuth <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/MailmanAuth> as a
sufficient answer for my needs. There are similar solutions for other
systems as well, at least three or four for tying the authentication
to a Simple Machines Forum.

The thing is, user-friendly user registration & admin is not an easy
thing to get right, and since it hasn't been properly done (yet!) for
PmWiki, I've found it much easier to make someone or something else
handle it. Mailman does this pretty well and has a sufficient number
of users to trust that it's relatively robust, as well as providing a
web interface that proved surprisingly easy to scrape.

Also, if you're heading for thousands of users having a mailing list
isn't a bad idea, though at some point you might want to write your
own front-end to the registration given the slight weirdness in having
to register for a mailing list in order to edit a wiki.

OTOH, the next time I need something like this on a new site I'll
probably use OpenID. Haven't looked at how good the related PmWiki
recipes for that are, but it shouldn't be too difficult to get to
work.

eemeli