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Here at KnowledgeTree, we recognize the importance of community contributions and the role that the community plays in driving product development and innovation.

To reward outstanding community contributions and contributors, we will be showcasing a top KnowledgeTree community project every couple of months. To kick off the showcase, I interviewed Istvan Hubay Cebrian from Sybase Portugal, (KnowledgeTree Premium partner) about his project, the "User Registration Plug-in".

DW: Briefly, describe this project and what it entails?
The "User Registration Plug-in" has been developed with one premise in mind - to allow anonymous users to individually register and access documents stored in KnowledgeTree. The plug-in itself provides smarty templates for the registration form, registration message, and the confirmation message. The plug-in's main features include the registration itself as well as e-mail account activation to facilitate (to a limited extent) identity confirmation.

DW: What inspired you to create this project?
This project has been created to provide a functionality a client of ours requested. Specifically, our client had requested a public Document Management System. They required anonymous users to only be able to browse through the available documents (no downloading, exporting or checking-out) and if one wished to download a particular document then he/she would need to register first. In light of this request, a plug-in was developed so that this same code could be given back to the community.

DW: What business problems were you looking at solving specifically with this project?
KnowledgeTree is mostly targeted for internal business or personal use. The development and publication of this plug-in has made it possible to use KnowledgeTree as a public document management system not limited to either anonymous or registered use.

DW: What other KnowledgeTree projects have you been involved with?
Lately Sybase SBS Software (Portugal) has been quite involved with the development of KnowledgeTree. Two plug-ins have been developed (with more on the way) namely the User Registration Plugin and the HTTP SSO Plugin. The latter is an improvement on the WinSSO plugin. Specifically, the WinSSO plugin had a few problems with the interceptor implementation as it would also only allow SSO when a user was in the KnowledgeTree database and it did not work for Kerberos authentication.

The new HTTP SSO plugin has been tested with Windows 2003 R2 AD using Kerberos authentication. It implements the new interceptor functions and searches both the KnowledgeTree database and all configured authentication sources. If a user is not found then one is redirected back to the login page. With a bit of Apache tweaking using the ErrorDocument directives and having two separate login points, one could implement a KnowledgeTree system with both SSO and normal login for users that are not part of the network.

DW: What would you say to encourage additional community participation?
Every open source project lives mainly from its community. With a thriving community OSS projects will undoubtedly succeed. It is imperative that everyone that uses and enjoys KnowledgeTree contribute their ideas, bug fixes, documentation, translations, etc. If these are given
back to the community, KnowledgeTree will without a doubt grow at a much faster rate (not that it doesn't right now). The forum is also an area in which the community can get help and give help. It is important that those of us that ask for help also try giving help to those that request it.

DW: What would you like to develop next for KnowledgeTree?
In all truth I can't think of anything in particular. KnowledgeTree is an extremely complete document management solution. Soon, however, I will be improving the User Registration Plugin, by ensuring that the "Register" link on the menu is added automatically when enabling the plugin. Will need to look into this.

DW: With KnowledgeTree 4.0 on the road-map, which KnowledgeTree feature would you most like to see included in the next major release?
Currently when logging in via one of the authentication sources, KnowledgeTree auto-creates each user with no group association. One feature that I would like to see implemented is the possibility to choose a group to which an auto-created user is assigned to.

I'd like to thank Istvan Hubay Cebrian for his time, and look forward to the next community project feature. Keep them coming!