I've recently come back to phplib et al.

There are quite  alot of phplib-based packages out there. But each one
seems to suppose that you're installing phplib for the first time. In
that case that's (almost) straight-forward most of the times.

The problem comes when you want to integrate one of these into a site
that already has its implementation of phplib, not disposable of
course.

Have you tried recently to integrate IMP or bookmarker into a
*preexisting* phplib site? It's a nightmare. 

I think there should be some guidelines for designing phplib-based
apps. And maybe phplib should offer some methods to make integration
smooth. Someway to respect  and merge smoothly  with any preexisting
phplib installation.
Ideally one should just need to, eventually, add the necessary extra
columns his auth_user table and go.

'How' is the problem.

The defines (_PHPLIB_[watever]) in local.inc would be a good point of
start


I've been thinking (and struggling) about this for a while, after
facing phplib-based packages that rely their  authentication to being
logged in to a popserver, a ldap directory, or whatever, and trying to
make them work with the preexisting authentication method. 

The standard of extending classes is already there, and is a excellent
base for this. 
But I think some work has to be done, both on the phplib developmen
side and the package development side, to somehow allow an easy
respect and assumption of any preexistent implementation of core
function as authentication, permission gerarchy logic, login
validation, password encryption,  an more and more.

Giancarlo Pinerolo


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