Marc Hughes


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I am a developer from a bit west of Boston.

Any open source user management/subscription systems?

05 Mar 2008

A while back I probed around to see if there are any open source user management systems out there and didn't come up with any great leads.


Weird thing, at my day-job, yesterday, the general manager asked me the same question.  Clearly there is a need for something like this.

My original list of requirements went something like this:

  • Allowing users to sign up (email verification, catpcha support, configurable list of user details to require)
  • Assign various access levels (or attributes?) to users.
  • Allow users to log in / log out 
  • Detect multiple failed logins for a user or from a source host with configurable temporary lockouts
  • Provide a simple API to use in applications that build upon it to get login status & access level (preferably language-agnostic)
  • Mechanism for retrieval of forgotten passwords (email? security question(s)?, combination?)
  • Provide a simple html based UI to handle all of these functions (including administrative functions like approving, disabling, changing access, etc.).
  • Provide an XML-RPC based interface to perform all of the functions so it's easily customizable by application that build upon it.
A new requirement that this request brought up was:
  • Support for paid subscriptions
So here's another blog post, and I'll go hit up the OSFlash mailing list to see if anything comes up.