How do you use the NewUserPlugin

I don't quite understand what this plugin wants do do for me. I have been struggling with LdapContrib (which I don't understand, but that's for another topic.) I've installed the LdapNgPlugin and GluePlugin to my currently running ("standard" topicusermapping and templatelogin) installation. I'm beginning to realize that as I'm using LDAP authentication, I might as well forgo registration altogether as well. I've gotten to the point where I can use my corporate credentials (jkern) to login, and it tells me "Hello John Kern". This plugin indicates that it will automatically generate for me a WikiName topic, but instead NewLdapUserTemplate seems to want to create something dynamically, which doesn't seem to match any of the WikiName topics already in place, and doesn't look like it intends to write out anything differently than the old WikiName topic anyway. Was I supposed to modify an example template or something?

-- JohnKern - 15 Apr 2010

NewUserPlugin only really serves a purpose when using an outside authentication like LDAP. If you are currently using TopicUserMapping you will not see its effect. LdapContrib is unfortunately a bit of a bandaid to Foswiki's authentication system. When a user logins using LDAP the wiki really doesn't know of their existence except via their session ID (This is speculative). This is where NewUserPlugin comes into play. It checks to see if a topic exists for the user's WikiName (which is generated depending on the user name mapper. e.g. LdapUserMapping) and creates it according to the new user template which is specified in SitePreferences. If you use the standard NewUserTemplate the topic is rather empty as that template is designed to extract data from the registration form. A better template is the NewLdapUserTemplate provided with NewUserPlugin. NewLdapUserTemplate creates a dynamic page that extracts data from the LDAP directory upon viewing. The data pulled from the LDAP directory and format of the page can be altered by editing RednerLdapUser.txt in the foswiki/data directory.

-- TuckerKern - 21 Jun 2011