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.
Hey Marc.
I’ve been searching for something like that too. It’s like we are reinventing user management all the time.