[pmwiki-users] "Official" release of UserAuth2 recipe

[The Editor]

On 5/17/07, ThomasP <pmwikidev at sigproc.de> wrote:
> Hello everybody in the pmwiki community,
>
> I have waited quite long but it is meanwhile more than time for this
> announcement:
>
> The new UserAuth module, called UserAuth2, is there!
>
> Originally actually thought only as a reimplementation of the former one,
> this module introduces some new features that I just happened to need. To
> name a few of them:
>
> * silent granting of permissions based on IP address
> * wildcards in specifying page permissions
> * page permissions depending on $AuthId, allowing "personally" accessible
> pages
>
> Thomas
>
> ========================================
>
> One may ask: why holding up another authorization module besides AuthUser?
> The thing is that I had the impression (maybe only from myself) that many
> newcomers to PmWiki tend to opt for a more "intuitive" (simple? familiar?)
> way of handling the authentication/authorization than is provided by
> AuthUser. (Note the quotation marks: I meanwhile can see quite clearly the
> advantages of AuthUser, still I would suggest that having the choice in
> the beginning is preferable.)
>
> There are also other points which may be of long term interest:
>
> For example Kathryn recently wanted to open up discussion pages alongside
> "usual" pages which would be editable also for guests. The point was not
> to screw up the page name format for this end. With UserAuth2 this could
> be done easily having a
>
> ed_*-Discussion
>
> entry in the GuestUsers permission table.
>
> The question is (as motivated by IchBin's question about JITS with
> AuthUser), and I would like to invite some discussion about this:
>
> How much compatibility support should UserAuth2 provide to and expect from
> other Cookbook recipes in the future?
>
> I would not mind to see UserAuth2 to be interchangably usable besides
> AuthUser if this is "technically possible" (this would be the most
> desirable solution for many users (to come)), which would need at least
> some initial coordination and standardization and will lead probably to
> some extra work, possible also on other recipes.
>
> I'm open for other ideas though.
>
> Thomas


I'd find it helpful to know what advantages UserAuth2 offers over
AuthUser. It would seem finding a way to add those in to AuthUser
would be a preferable path. At least it's what I've tried to do with
the MemberMgmt recipe and ZAP's authentication scheme--which tries to
tie into and expands AuthUser's capabilities.  But then again, if
there are various UserAuth2 features not possible in AuthUser, that's
a different story.

Could you shed a little light here on the main advantages of UserAuth.
I've never used it, and there may be others here who would be
interested in exploring it more.

Cheers,
Dan