The quick version

You can now create a PhagesDB account using a Google (gmail), Facebook, or Twitter account. If you already have a PhagesDB account, you can log in, then go to our connections page to assocaite your existing account with your social media account.

In the future, simply sign in with the social media account. No more remembering a separate password for PhagesDB! (Unless you want to. Regular accounts are still an option.)

Existing users

There are two big improvements in signing in for existing users.

• Login then connect your existing account to social media, as described above.


• Login the old-fashioned way, but now you can use your email address instead of a username.

The second point tripped many people up with the old system, since it required you to remember a username that you might not use very frequently.

New users

Hopefully, this will really streamline the registration process at PhagesDB for new users. Just in time for most of the new students who will be joining the community this academic year. I've been meaning to do something like this for a while, but it was actually a bit tricky.

Hopefully, most of you incoming students have an account with one of those three providers. If not, let me know what other third-party sign-in options you'd like, and I may be able to help!

Crossover accounts

I'm currently working a lot on the new seaphages.org site that will hopefully serve as the major online hub for the SEA-PHAGES program. You can't see a lot of what's happened there yet, but it's coming soon.

The relevant bit is that your PhagesDB account will work on seaphages.org as well. This is important as seaphages.org will replace the wiki as it's phased out over the next year or so. That means anyone (faculty/students/others) with a PhagesDB account will also have a seaphages.org account without having to do any extra work.

Nitty Gritty

PhagesDB is written in python using the Django framework. I had been using, for a long time, the django-registration plugin to handle user login/authentication/passwords/etc. This update was a switch from that to django-allauth, which was quite reasonable to set up, and handles both regular user registration and social account registration. Highly recommended.

As always, let us know if anything's not working as it should. There are bound to be a few kinks.