DokuWiki Auth Backends

In addition to the ordinary plug-in mechanism, DokuWiki offers a special kind of extensions called Authentication Backends. The usage of one or another Authentication Backend is in fact only important for the page administrator. Still, since Wiki is a system that is used by many users (in contrast to blog, in that only few editors are present), it is worth to link the user data base to an existing one, in order to minimize the maintenance costs for the administrator and the number of different logins for the user.

The Authentication Backend is responsible for the login and logout of the user to the system and for the validation of the state, if the user is currently logged-in or not. In addition, the backend can support administration tasks like creation of users, groups, asignment of the ones to the other, etc. The flexibility of the choice of Authentication Backend allows for an easy integration of DokuWiki in existing systems and usage of it in a Single Sing-On (SSO) scenario.