[Systers-dev] Fwd: [Mailman-Users] [Mailman-Developers] openID enabled mailman

[Jennifer Redman]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 12:08 AM, Malveeka Tewari <malveeka at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Sarah
>
> Thanks for your input.
> I am presently working on the third step - patching up mailman to support
> OpenID as a relying party.
> This is an interesting page that lays a road map as to how to implement
> OpenID for a website that has user accounts.
> http://www.plaxo.com/api/openid_recipe



Once caveat is to remember to think in terms of scalability.  We are using
mailman uid's and passwords because our 2500+ membership base already has
those uids and pw and it would be much easier to grant members access to
other applications using their existing accounts.

I really think that we are missing a step that comes before working
primarily on OpenId or Cookies, or LDAP and that is converting our existing
membership base that is stored in Mailman to be stored in an object that is
(I think this is what Sarah is getting at as well as those who responded to
your posts on the mailing lists)

1) More secure
2) Stored and accessed in a way that will be accessible to multiple
applications (including mailman) (preferably in Postgres), (and has the
potential to support a gui so Systers are able to change their UID/Pasword
options - future project)

Think in terms of a Systers membership management tool.  Additionally,
mailman is going to change and eventually become MM3 which is a complete
rewrite.  We need to make sure that the work we do now is not going to
necessitate a complete rewrite every time an upgrade comes along or we'd
like to make a new application available.  I don't think that just patching
up mailman 2.x is really a scalable solution.

Malveeka, I think you need to have a least a conversation with Andy and
Kanika Vats (and Sarah too if you are interested) about the ORM project and
a possibility of created some sort of sql membership type module that can be
used with multiple authentication options (including Mailman)

Jen