[pmwiki-users] read access password question

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 07:59:55PM +0100, Hans wrote:
> Wednesday, September 6, 2006, 7:33:58 PM, Patrick wrote:
> 
> > Are you using authorization groups and/or authuser?  If so, it's
> > as easy as:
> 
> >     (:pagelist fmt=#group group=Editions*:)
> 
> > which will display a list of all groups for which the person has
> > read permission set (assuming $EnablePageListProtect is 1, the default).
> 
> So far I was not using authuser or userauth, just plain passwords via
> ?action=attr
> What are authorisation groups? 

Authorization groups allow an identity to be associated with
a set of "groups".  For example, you could have groups like:

    @edition1: alice, bob
    @edition2: alice, carol
    @edition3: alice, bob, carol

and then alice's username and password would let her view all
three editions, while bob's would only allow @edition1 and @edition3.

The advantage to authors is that each author only needs a single
username and password to access authorized pages, instead of needing
a separate password for each edition.  The downside, of course,
is needing to maintain separate username/password combinations.

> I was imagining that there will be groups like edition1,
> edition2, edition3 etc with passwords Aedition1, Bedition2, Cedition3
> etc. and subscribers get mailed the password for the edition(s) they
> subscribe to. How does this relate to user groups?

Going back to your original question (display a list of all
groups for which the person has read permission), the difficulty
I see with this approach is that a person would have to enter 
all of his/her passwords in order for PmWiki to know which groups 
they have access to.  Either that or there has to be some quick way
for a person to say "restore all of my known password settings", 
such as by using browser cookies or the like.

I feel like I'm missing a simple (and possibly obvious) answer
to all of this, but I can't seem to come up with it at the moment.

Pm