[Mailman-Developers] Browser ID integration with Mailman

[Florian Fuchs]

Hi, 
 
> I don't think much has been discussed about it, but maybe Florian has thought
> more about how to integrate it with the mm3 ui.

I haven't had the opportunity to implement browserid on a website so far, but here are a few random thoughts on the subject:

1) Browserid is very convenient, but I wouldn't rely on it as the only means to log into the MM web ui. It relies on client-side code to be run, which has a lot of advantages usability-wise but also has some accessibility pitfalls. I don't think that's a reason *not* to implement browserid, but probably more as one of more auth-methods that site admins can choose when setting up their installation of mailman. 

2) The server-side verification part of their example application [1] is done using node.js. I think creating a similar thing in python and making a django AuthBackend out of it could be a very nice task. A quick search brought up two django-browserid implementations ([2], [3]), but in both cases I'm not sure if this is how we would do it in our web ui. (Both are stand-alone reusable apps - I think we'd rather integrate something like that directly as part of our app code. But that's probably debatable...).

3) If this is too small a task for the whole summer I think it could be made part of a slightly larger login/user-related package. The wiki page for last year's GHC11 Open source day [4] describes some ideas that could fit in nicely (for example storing some additional user info, like their twitter account, ... see section "Subscriber info summary").

As I said these are random thoughts...

Cheers
Florian



[1] https://github.com/lloyd/myfavoritebeer.org/
[2] https://github.com/mozilla/django-browserid
[3] https://github.com/mozilla/django-browserid
[4] http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Notes+from+the+GHC11+Open+Source+Day


> 
> -Barry
> _______________________________________________
> Mailman-Developers mailing list
> Mailman-Developers at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
> Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3
> Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/
> Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/f%40state-of-mind.de
> 
> Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9