Lift has been an interesting experience so far, particularly since I'm learning Scala at the same time. Lift comes with quite a few built-in mechanisms to handle various features, such as authentication, authorization and role-based access control. A lot of the documentation utilizes these built-ins to good effect, but because the core mechanisms are complete skipped, you have no idea where to start if you have to roll your own authentication. A suggestion for Lift documentation: cover the basic introduction first, then show how Lift builds on that foundation. I present here the simplest possible authentication scheme for Lift, inspired by this page on the liftweb wiki : object isLoggedIn extends SessionVar[Boolean](false) ... // in Boot.scala LiftRules.loggedInTest = Full(() => isLoggedIn.get) That last line only needs to return a boolean. If you wish to include this with Lift's white-listed menu system, you merely need to add this sort of test: val auth = If(() =&g