[pmwiki-users] DBauth question

[Marc Cooper]

Jason Frisvold said...
> On 6/27/06, Marc Cooper <gmane at auxbuss.com> wrote:
>
> Cool!  :)  I'm looking forward to this.  DBAuth at the moment seems
> more of a hack than a recipe..  No offense meant.  :)  I had to hack
> it up a bit to make it work the way I wanted.

Yup, I think Ben mentioned that. I take no credit for dbauth, which is 
all Ben's work.
 
> Any chance you're looking into groups as well?  As in, retrieving from
> the database a list of the groups that the user is in???  I'm digging
> into how to handle that now..

It's in my plan, but I don't know about Ben's for authuser_dbase.

I was going to use an array in the user row, but I came up with a good 
reason for making it a separate table, which escapes me at the moment - 
probably something to do with the user admin stuff I have in mind.

> > I'd also comment out the $AuthForm lines in dbauth.php, since this
> > overrides Site.AuthForm and it's easier to manage this within PmWiki,
> > imo.
> 
> Hrm..  easier to manage how?  Just comment out the $AuthForm?

Yes, after which it will use Site.AuthForm - authuser_dbase does this. 
It's just a lot easier to amend, and more PmWiki-ish, imo.
 
> > No reason at all. In addition, I have my own version of dbauth in
> > which I perform a range of functions against the database at login and
> > store what I need in session variables, so that I don't need to go to
> > the db repeatedly.
> 
> If you do go this route, though, use good table design.  Don't litter
> the user auth tables with useless junk that is better suited to it's
> own table...

Oh, sadly I a bit about normalizing a database - things from a previous 
life. However, when you start pulling stuff in from various processes - 
authentication, authorization, customer care, sales tracking, finance, 
etc. - you often end up building bridges or end up with SQL from hell; 
it works, but no-one else can understand it and neither can you a month 
or two later. A negligible performance hit is often a good trade off for 
easier maintenance, imo - YMMV.

> > However, as I asked elsewhere, I'm stuck on a really, really basic
> > PmWiki lack of knowledge thing :-(
> 
> I think I'm in the same boat..  I'm decent with php and sql, but I'm
> not familiar at all with the pmwiki code yet...

It's a familiar place, eh? It'll all be fine in a day (or week) or two, 
but right now I'm wandering around like a native and suddenly the lights 
go out ;-)

-- 
Best,
Marc