[Pmwiki-users] PmWiki development

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 07:43:31PM -0700, Steven Leite wrote:
> There was a lot of talk a while ago about introducing (some form) of
> user authentication.  Just wondering if you'd given any thought to that
> in this new design.  Where does that rank on the Development list? (eg.
> High, Med. Low?)

I haven't given it much thought, simply because I still haven't come 
up with any good ideas about how to control authorization (determining 
what actions a user is allowed to perform and where) after a user has
been authenticated.

I can come up with simplistic systems such as "limit edits to 
authenticated users" and "always allow authenticated users to 
perform actions X,Y,Z", but once we get into things such as
access control lists with "allow users A, B, and C to edit 
pages D and E; allow users A and C but not H to edit groups 
F and G; etc." then I'm at a loss as to how to make a simple 
interface for maintaining the access control lists.

This is another one of those cases where it would help tremendously
to have a real-world example of what is needed, rather than to
try to guess based on what is possible.

Pm