Acts As Administered Authentication

Rick Olson's acts_as_authenticated (hereby referred to as AAA) is very arguably the best login system for Ruby on Rails. The reason for this is:

• Simple and minimalistic. You get the basics. Login, signup, logout. This should be the foundation for any good login system, and if the developer needs more than it can easily be extended.
• Unstyled. AAA is not styled heavily because virtually every install is going to require a unique look. Styling the base would simply make developers and designers spend more time stripping the installed style to implement theirs.
• Well developed. Do you see a trend developing? AAA is fantastic because it starts with the very basics, and then provides easy methods for developers to extend it to their heart's content. This is largely because of the clean and well developed codebase.

So what is Acts As Administered Authentication?

AAA is based on the public registration model. This means users can sign up and log into your app. This was useful, for example, when we developed Userscripts.org.

Acts As Administered Authentication is built on the simplicity of AAA, but with controlled user administration. When you install the plugin you are provided with a default Admin user, who can then add, edit, and delete users to the system. There is no public signup out-of-the-box, but I left Rick's signup code in there, so it can be restored by simply uncommenting a few blocks.

Pictures Speak Louder than Words

Listing users.	Creating a new user.
Deleting a user.

Credit Where Credit's Due

Hello. My name's Britt Selvitelle. As mentioned before, I created this plugin based on Rick Olson's fantastic acts_as_authenticated. When I first started to work on this, I wanted it to be something that sat in parallel to AAA, but in the end decided it best to just extend his existing framework.