pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Chad Knepp wrote:
> Adding users is proving to be a little more complicated than I
> expected, but that is what I have been working on.  Most of the
> problem is that apache doesn't provide a cgi hook to http basic
> authentication and we need more flexibility than basic auth on its
> own.  I was hoping to have a release with users and comments ready by
> the time Stephanie got back, but that's only two days from now and I'm
> mighty distracted by a nine week old ball of black and white energy in
> the form of a Border Collie that entered my life this year.
There seems to be two ways to to do logins.
1) using http basic auth. Seems like this causes a special popup window 
to appear where users can put in login details.
2) Just use a user name/password form, do our own login verification 
setting cookies and such like.

I noticed something in php manual about former yesterday
>>>
 The HTTP Authentication hooks in PHP are only available when it is 
running as an Apache module and is hence not available in the CGI 
version. In an Apache module PHP script, it is possible to use the 
header() function to send an "Authentication Required" message to the 
client browser causing it to pop up a Username/Password input window. 
Once the user has filled in a username and a password, the URL 
containing the PHP script will be called again with the variables, 
$PHP_AUTH_USER, $PHP_AUTH_PW and $PHP_AUTH_TYPE set to the user name, 
password and authentication type respectively. Only "Basic" 
authentication is supported at this point. See the header()  function 
for more information.
>>>

Generally I think I'd prefer the latter. Its more what people are used 
to. Are their any standard python libraries for this sort of stuff?

Don't really know much about this stuff. For comments on pfaf site
I've never bothered with logins at all, i.e. anyone can add a comment.
As this does not destroy data its OK in my book.

Hope thats of some help

Rich