FP assumes each school already has some kind of database for student & faculty usernames and passwords.  FlightPath needs that information to be transferred in to the tables users, faculty, and students.  As with other aspects of FlightPath, this can be done either with a nightly transfer job, or by overriding FP's code to tell it how to retrieve this data from your existing system.

LDAP?  You're in luck.  There is an LDAP module for facilitating logging in to FP through an LDAP connection.

If not using LDAP, the user's password is expected to be stored in the users table using a modern password hash algorithm.  If you need to change this scheme, you will need to override the core module "user", or write your own authentication module similar to the LDAP module.

CWID

FlightPath relies heavily on the use of CWIDs, or "Campus-Wide IDs".  This is an alpha-numeric identifier unique to each person who uses FlightPath, either student or faculty member.  In the old days, many schools used a person's SSN for this purpose, but this is discouraged due to security concerns.  If your school does not already have a system in place for assigning unique identifiers to users, you will need to implement one.  Ex:   100234, S112345, etc.

is_student or is_faculty

The user table contains the fields is_student and is_faculty.  As the names imply, they should be set to either "1" or "0" depending on if the user is a student or faculty member.  At the moment, a user could hypothetically be both, but support for that situation is experimental at the moment.  Instead, it is recommended that such a user have 2 separate entries, with 2 separate user_name's.  Users are allowed to have the same CWID.

Depending on which flag is set, the user needs to also be added to either the faculty table or students table, with the appropriate data being entered into those tables as well.

advisor_student table

You may also assigned students to advisors in this table, using CWIDs for both users.

User Management

Once your faculty members have all been entered (FP makes no distinction between faculty members and staff members-- both are referred to as faculty), you will be able to manage their roles and permissions using the FlightPath Admin Console.  More on that in another section.