Interaction makes it easy to manage the members of a website using drag & drop and intuitive dialogs on the Macintosh. Membership management is built into Interaction, so you don't have to purchase additional software just for managing the members of your sites. Another benefit is that many of the features of Interaction can take advantage of the integrated membership support.
The Membership Manager is similar to the Users & Groups dialogs of the Mac, but optimized for websites. Interaction maintains membership information separately from the Users & Groups of the Mac for improved security and efficiency. The information is kept in Interaction's object database and in RAM for fast access at serving time. Interaction will look up and authenticate a member just as fast no matter the number of members, allowing a virtually unlimited number of members without noticable effects on server performance.
All members have a username and password so that their identity can be authenticated. Interaction associates access privileges with a member, so your members don't have to sign in more than once.
Each member can have an optional email address. Interaction may use this email address to contact the member, or you can use it for your own reference.
It is often useful to limit the duration of a membership. Each member subscription has an optional expiration date and a countdown of remaining time in hours, minutes and seconds.
An educational site may use subscriptions to make student's membership expire at the end of the semester. A pay-for-use website can restrict how long time a member can access the site before he has to renew his membership, facilitating a subscriber based revenue model.
Interaction can restrict which pages are accessible for expired members. The webmaster can also specify information that only are shown for expired members. This can be used to inform expired members about how to renew their subscriptions, without disturbing everybody else with the same messages.
Each member can be part of one or more groups. For example, students in the same class can be placed in a group that matches the name of the class.
Groups makes it easy to assign the same access privileges to multiple members. Any location or entity of Interaction can be restricted to a specific group using an access restriction, with no need for constructing complex realm match strings. Interaction even adapts the website and pages depending on the groups a member has joined, only showing the parts a member is allowed to view. This provides an easy to use mechanism for websites that are personalized to the visitor.
The optional Member Groups component allows members to view a list of the groups that they belong to directly in the web page.
The optional Registration component enables visitors to register as new members of your site. The visitor submits a username and password using a customizable form on their web browser. The registration is highly customizable, allowing the webmaster to tailor all feedback messages included the optional email that are sent to new members.
We are working on comprehensive web based administration of membership.
Interaction can import membership information from databases such as FileMaker. Simply export the information from the database as a tab-delimited file and drag & drop the file onto the membership manager. Interaction imports the modifications, merging them with existing members.
To facilitate interchange, Interaction maintains a copy of the membership information in XML format. XML files can be modified with scripts, edited remotely or repurposed by other XML savvy software. This gives additional flexibility for advanced webmasters.