[[!comment format=mdwn
 username="jmtd@d79be1606aba831a3b476d5fff7d99f4b321eab2"
 nickname="jmtd"
 avatar="http://cdn.libravatar.org/avatar/96f1bc700fdf0fc814f40c90391a6b53"
 subject="comment 4"
 date="2017-03-03T14:29:11Z"
 content="""
If we are talking about configuring the HTTPD to use HTTP basic auth, the UI for HTTP Basic authentication is not great; it is not well supported on mobile devices; it's not well managed by browsers which can remember login credentials and it's not well supported by password managers. Most serious web applications do not use it and instead have their own bespoke session management stuff. Indeed Ikiwiki already has machinery for logins and sessions (I've just completed it on ikiwiki.info to post this comment). So I still think it would be nice to have it necessary to log in to view some, or all, pages in some circumstances.

Of course for HTTPD-mediated login, it doesn't have to be HTTP Basic, but not many users will have the skills or infrastructure to set up something like Shibboleth for their ikiwikis.

To some extent this dovetails with another wishlist item of mine, which is the ability to generate a CGI-only ikiwiki. This is useful if you have an existing ikiwiki which is large, and you want to run a dev or test one in parallel, but don't want to share the src dir, and don't want to have a second git clone of the material knocking around. -- [[users/jon]]
"""]]
