Registration Beyond Dakar

Registration code has changed a lot between Cairo and DakarRelease, yet there are a couple of open issues. While I'm hacking on ApprovingRegistrations, I ask all interested parties to review and complete the following list of topics relating to registration and login. Many are partially obsolete, totally obsolete, not being maintained since a year, or so, and are in more or less need of refactoring. Please have a look whether the topic covering Your Favourite Issue is mentioned.

The future changes I have in mind probably shouldn't make it into DakarRelease given there was a code freeze in july. But maybe we can create it as an addon on top of Dakar. See below....

Registration Topics in TWiki

• The hard facts
  • TWikiRegistration - that's how it works right now. That's Cairo right now.
  • RegisterCgiScript - a not extremely helpful description of the old module.
• Registration in DakarRelease
  • RegisterCgiScriptRewrite and RegistrationAsPlugin - two articles by MartinCleaver describing what has been intended to do (and mostly done) with registration in DakarRelease. Active discussion took place mainly in October 2004.
  • RemoveWriteProtectionOfUserHomePages and CairoDakarRegistrationDifference - offshots from Bugs::Item593 and Bugs::Item594, respectively, which basically complain about what has been done with registration in DakarRelease.
  • ApprovingRegistrations - pretty much to the point of what I'm going to do within the next days. Hey - it says there's a patch available on that page! Some doubts whether the patch works for Dakar might be in order, though....
  • TWikiAuthenticationDev - a gateway topic in itself, happily asleep since Feb 2004. Should we awaken it?
• From the Support web, mainly concerning problems with "foreign" login names:
  • NumericIntranetLoginNameProblem - TWiki doesn't catch the case of purely numeric userids, which fail when storing with RCS.
  • LoginNameAndNtlm, AuthenticatedUsernamesWithSpaces, IisAuthentication - similar discussions about NTLM login names, having spaces and backslashes as special characters.
  • TWikiRegistrationHowToCheckUsername - again a similar topic, this time with Kerberos login names
• My contributions regarding the registration/authentication process:
  • HowToAvoidRegistration - in an intranet, everyone is entitled to register. Why not automate?
  • TransparentAuthenticationRevisited - the world has moved on in intranet portals, TWiki has to catch on.
  • RegistrationOnDemandHack - just a proof of concept.
  • UnregisteredUsersShouldBeTWikiGuests - don't try to use login names as wikinames for unregistered users.
  • RestrictResetPasswordToAdmin - Allowing unknown users to reset others' passwords can become a nightmare.
• Related Plugins
  • LoginNameAliasesPlugin - can be used as a workaround/solution for most of the problems with mapping between login name and wikiname.
• ManageStaleContent - valid for many of the registration topics

Outline of Plans

• Add ApprovingRegistrations (You want it documented and testcases as well? Darn. I could have guessed that. Need another day or two.)
• Separate the code for password management (change/reset) out of lib/TWiki/UI/Register.pm. Consolidate with lib/TWiki/User.pm and the =lib/TWiki/Users*/ modules.
  • Allows to plug in custom registration code without having to bother about password management.
  • Allows to consistently replace all aspects of password managers.
• Make TWiki Do The Right Thing in the registration templates depending on configuration settings
• To be continued.....

-- HaraldJoerg - 08 Nov 2005