After you have enabled ACL in the config file you need to decide how you like to store user data. DokuWiki supports various methods and creating a new one is pretty easy. DokuWiki uses so–called authentication plugins that provide certain methods to store user data and passwords. The user won't even see this plugin but you as an administrator have to set up your desired authentication plugin and configure it properly. The plain authentication plugin is DokuWikis default simple version.

• Look for available Auth Plugins in the plugin repository.

The plugins can be installed using the Extension Manager. If the available plugins do not fulfill the requirements, you can create your own auth plugin. For details see How to write an Authentication Plugin?

Since the release 2013-05-10 “Weatherwax” DokuWiki uses Authentication Plugins instead of Authentication Backends. This requires action from the administrator when upgrading such a wiki. See old authentication backends for FAQ and the previous backends.

• Chained Authentication – Use a sequence of authentication backends (e.g. LDAP then plain )
• virtualgroup – allows to assign groups to a user independently from the backend.

Some suggestions grouped by tags in the plugin repository:

• Plugins with acl-tag
• Plugins with groups-tag
• Plugins with users-tag

Some relevant tips related to authentication backends

• Change user name after authentication – Suggestion how to change the username after authentication (e.g. you want to allow login via a unique id that could change sometime (e.g. email address), but use another unmodifiable unique id as permanent identifier in Dokuwiki)
• How to keep the login data of two web applications (e.g. a DokuWiki and a forum software) synchronised? See this forum post.