We are getting very close to an alpha release of our Site Authentication Manager (working name).

The goals of this project are to provide very granular user access permission to varying areas of a website, its scripts and their sessions. SAM is also being designed to preauthentice users as they enter other scripts. In this context, SAM becomes something of a "Super Bridge" that maintains its own user database and sessions, and uses its knowledge of third party scripts to ensure users a "seamless" experience while navigating through the various applications or scripts the webmaster has chosen to include.

SAM will create sessions for users as they go from script to script, ensure they belong to that user, and do it all from a single login event. SAM can also be implemented by script writers who do not wish to go through the process of creating authentication components for thier scripts. It can easily be incorporated with a single include statement in the script, and an accompanying configuration file.

During our internal design and testing phase, we have been targetting the open source products Joomla and Coppermine for inclusion as well as the free SMF forum application. We have also used a couple of private scripts to test its extendability, and it has worked well on all tested. It is our hope that each of these groups will recognize the value of this effort, the convenience it will bring to its users, and that at some point we will be able to hand off maintenance of the appropriate application interfaces to them. But for the moment we have neither contacted them nor sought their assistance.

Our ultimate goal is to create a singular "Web Site Contoller" that eases transition from software application to software application, which will ultimately allow webmasters the freedom to choose "best in class" or "best for the application" scripts to include on their websites, as well as the freedom to add and or delete these without affecting their ability to authenticate users, and to be able to quickly get new applications up and running. This will include the import of thier registered users with each new application installed.

Current features that are targetted with this release:

• Single Logon for all included scripts
• Highly granular permission capabilities that regulate access
• Establishment of "contexts", transparent to web site users that set rules and permissions for each application
• Small memory footprint in external scripts
• On demand session management, each context (and its scripts or application) is only managed when a user makes changes to his/her user profile, or when that script is actually executed.
• Recreates lost or dropped sessions on the fly, as a user enters each context.
• Html "wrapper" that can be ported out to each application, providing a single point for webmasters to edit that provide uniform headers and footers for each.
• Hacks for each application are limited to single line inclusions in one central script, and appropriate modifications to "templates" or "themes" of those scripts.

• Single admin interface for all contexts (external scripts) for user management, and for user group management
• Easy integration of scipts that do not share user, group, or session capabilities via classes and internal methods designed for this purpose.

SAM is currently not for the faint of heart when it comes to PHP programming, and we do not expect it to reach that point until it enters its beta phase. If you are experienced with edited, creating, and troubleshooting PHP scripts, and are interested in what SAM can provide for you, we encourage you to contact us via any of the contact options on this website.

We are looking for folks who want to assist us in the process of getting this software package released, and who can participate in the process of troubleshooting and debugging the application.

Decisions regarding the type of license we intend to release it under have not been made yet, so participants will need to be able to enter non-disclosure agreements with us, and subject to US law (thus citizens of the US or Canada). We will eventually release SAM under some form of open source free license, and will make that decision as we get closer to a beta release.