On 11 Apr 2005, at 08:02, Stephen Bannasch wrote:
In the medium term I'd like to use a single authentication system for a series services on deanbrook.org including mediawiki.
You need to analyze which system most tightly grasps its user information (high internal cohesion), and that is probably the one to modify. If one of your systems is rather loosely bound, that should be the system you're feeding info to.
I managed to turn MediaWiki 1.4b5 into a general-purpose membership database. I changed the login screen to require first and last names, which I stuff into new fields, then concat to make the MediaWiki user name. I pre-loaded the user database with the membership info, which had been in a spreadsheet, by exporting as CSV, then importing into new fields I added to mw_user table. I then changed the preferences to allow users to maintain their own contact info. It still requires SQL access to change somethings like membership state, when dues were last paid, etc., but I'm fairly happy with it.
I changed Special:Listusers so that it outputs contact info in a table, and I was going to hack SpecialUser.php so that certain contact info would be displayed at the top or bottom of the User page, but ran out of steam. At some point,
I know this is not exactly what you're looking for, but just wanted to say that I found the user stuff on MediaWiki tightly integrated, but fairly easy to modify. If I were to try to get it to work with some other PHP package, I'd hack that other package to get its login info from the mw_user table.
:::: I'm the commander - see, I don't need to explain - I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation. -- George W. Bush :::: Jan Steinman http://www.IslandSeeds.org/wiki