[pmwiki-users] php form generator

[The Editor]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:50 PM, Swift, Chris <Chris.Swift at eu.dodea.edu> wrote:
> Dan,
>
> I appreciate you going the extra mile in trying to help aide me in this
> situation.
>
> Let me start with explaining what I need and then I'll say what I did.
>
> I am in need of some authentication system that would allow my users to
> login and self-register.  Right now what I think I would like to do is to
> have my users login with a general username and password that I set (such as
> name "opentoallusers" and password "fun").  Then, if they want to edit any
> content, then they would have to register.  Here is where my problems
> starts, because I need a lot of info on them such as username (they want to
> have show up as they are online), first and last name, address, e-mail,
> phone number and a couple other fields.  All of the information they provide
> me would have to be stored in a place that only I (the administrator) could
> access or only they (the single user) could see.  Additionally, I need an
> e-mail possibility, in which they would have to receive an e-mail
> confirmation from their sign up (in order to make sure their account is
> legit).  Basically this is very standard stuff.  When you register
> now-a-days you have to provide tons of fields of info and then you get an
> e-mail sent to you with a link that you click in order to finish the
> registration.  That's what I need and I believe ZAP could provide.

This is NOT easy.  Esp the email verification part. I have a plugin
for this at BoltWire, but don't know that I ever got that far in ZAP.
We could tinker along step by step. Though honestly, I think it might
be easier to develop a script to export your PmWiki pages TO BoltWire
and you could get all this stuff automatically. And I'd be much better
able to help.

As for as getting users to register and collect their information
that's easy enough with ZAP. And PmWiki has plenty good protection
capabilities to hide this information from prying eyes... Not sure I
got the part about a general username. It seems each would have to
have a different name to tag your info to. You can of course setup
groups which give different users different privileges. Perhaps that
is what you meant.

> So, what I did was to download both the ZAP and ZAP toolbox recipes.  I then
> added them into my config page.  Afterwards, I followed the directions from
> http://zapdoc.web-farm.org where I created a ZAP config page verbatum from
> the website (which it stated on that website I had to do for security
> reasons) and clicked on save.  I then placed a link on my authuser page (the
> PMWiki page that shows up in order to login).  This link went to a page that
> I created zap.login page at which I copied and pasted the member management
> information:

Probably the problem is the ZAPconfig page. It's an advanced feature
that is not necessary. And it's not a security risk if you are
controlling edit access. Once we get it working, I can show you how to
tighten security using this page if you wish. But for now make sure it
does NOT exist. Try putting these lines in your local config page:

<?php if (!defined('PmWiki')) exit();
include_once("$FarmD/scripts/authuser.php");
include_once("$FarmD/cookbook/zap.php");
include_once("$FarmD/cookbook/zaptoolbox.php");

Again remember to delete the zap config page. Your first goal is to
get this snippet working:

(:zapform key=check:)(:zapget:)
(:zap Install="Installation Successful" check:)
(:zap passdata="Install" check:)
(:input submit value="Test Install":) {$Install}
(:zapend:)

Put it on a page. It should show the Installation Successful message
when you click the button. If not, we got installation problems.

> Unfortunately, it locked me completely out of PMWiki.  So, fortunately I had
> made a back-up copy before adding ZAP and tried a different registration
> system.

Not sure how this happened.

> I know I screwed up (probably in this case royally) since I'm a very novice
> user.  I have HTML coding experience and am trying to self-teach myself on
> PhP now, but I'm still lacking.

No, if you had problems, I'm sure it's because ZAP isn't user friendly
enough. Part of the problem is PmWiki's design, which isn't really
adapted to this kind of thing. I had to use a number of workarounds to
get the functionality I wanted, which unfortunately complicated things
here and there a bit. Or perhaps ZAP was just trying to do things
PmWiki wasn't intended to do.

> Thanks for your help on this matter,

I'll do what I can, but no promises... Just want to help you get started...

Cheers,
Dan