Single sign-on across Manila sites?

[David A. Bayly]

>So I'm looking through the documentation online, and I found this at
>http://manilanewbies.userland.com/usersguide/membershipprefs/urls :
>
>"The URLs settings are used only when you want to share Membership
>between Manila sites. This is an advanced feature that requires Frontier
>scripting of the Manila servers to make it work. Unless you have
>Frontier access to both servers and an understanding of how the
>Membership system works in Frontier, these URLs should not be changed."
>
>As I understand this, if you become a member at www.abc.com, you can
>also automatically become a member at www.def.com (assuming everything
>is set up correctly). I have two questions:
>
>1. Are Frontier scripts making this possible available anywhere? I'd
>love to see them.
>
>2. Does the ability to share membership across sites mean single sign-on
>across sites? In other words, if I sign in as a member at abc.com, & I
>then head over to def.com, am I already logged in at def.com?
>

It does indeed means a single logon, which is better understood as a 
single cookie. The membership is common because the cookie is common. 
The cookie is common because the value in  your #prefs table called 
defaultMembershipGroup points at an entry in the members root whose 
value is normally the address of the #membership table in your manila 
websit which contains an entry called cookieName . If you change the 
value in prefs to point to some other membership table , for example 
another Manila website,  you get another value for cookiename. And, 
that's what mainresponder uses to keep note of your logged on state.

Much the same trick is used to locate the discussion group, so you 
can share those too.

Its a clever bit of design and one of the subtlest features of Manila.

I know of no script to let you set the preference value generally, 
though I've used the trick in on of a kind situations.   Pretty easy 
to do it manually if you have access to the server.


-- 

- David Bayly.       Programmer and digest reader.     dbayly at udena dot ch
  		Digest Readers do it once a day.