Authlogic

Allen Walker recently needed to implement user authentication and confirmation for www.fadethepublic.com. Authlogic is a very comprehensive login rails gem, but does not explicitly provide for the confirmation of user emails. Without such confirmation, users could sign up with bogus emails, then when the system sends out periodic emails to those accounts, it could be flagged as spam. Authlogic provides a perishable_token field for every user account, which is then used by a third party library called auth_helpers. Authhelpers provides nice framework for email confirmation/validation using the authlogic library. I will explain how to install authhelpers at a basic level and demonstrate the functionality it provides realtime with the website. It’s not entirely bug free and the author is still working on it, but it is usable.

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