GUI/WYSIWYG Editor and Authentication

[Chris Rigsby]

I have been running the XWiki 0.9.840 release for several months now, 
and I personally find it very useful.  However, when I tried to have 
other people who are not familiar with the general idea of markup 
languages try to start using XWiki in conjunction with a project, they 
had problems.  So, my rant here is that in order for XWiki to become 
useful for me as a general purpose enterprise collaboration tool, the 
GUI/WYSIWYG editor needs to be working.  Can any provide 
information/details about if or when this will be ready and working? 

The second barrier for widespread usage I can overcome myself, if I can 
get a small jumpstart: user creation and authentication.  I have two 
goals here:

1. integrate with my organization's existing web signon system - we have 
a central web signon page that sets a secure session cookie (very 
similar to a Kerberos TGT) in user's browser after authentication.  Web 
apps that recognize the cookie can then make a callback to a central 
server to check the validity of the cookie and receive user attributes 
(user ID and other authorization attributes). 

2. Integration with Shibboleth for authentication - similar to above, 
but works beyond the boundaries of an organization's authentication 
system to "federate" identity.  See:
    http://shibboleth.internet2.edu
    http://www.protectnetwork.org
    http://www.openidp.org

On the admin pages there's basic information about the plugable 
authentication structure, so it looks like I should be able to build the 
appropriate classes.  My questions are:

A. How do I get started as a "developer"? 
2. How do I edit the Login page to recognize an existing cookie of my 
choice? 
D. How do I tell XWiki to look for this cookie whenever a user arrives 
at the site (ie a new servlet session is created)?

Thanks in advance. 

Chris Rigsby
Systems Architect, Enterprise Application Systems
University of Minnesota
rigsb007 at umn.edu * 612/624-5334