hi, someone wrote earlier asking if this can be done. yes, but only to a certain extent. you still have to use the user database that is part of zope, which requires 4 fields (no more, no less). once your user has been authenticated via that, you can pass the data to your mysql database to do any other stuff you are thinking of doing, logging, data storage, etc. one benefit is that your user data can be stored outside of the data.fs file, and hence keep it fairly lean. steps you will need to take: download and install ZMySQLda and the MySQLdb.py packages. you might need to hunt around for the latter, as the link from andy dustman's zope users page was inactive when i last looked for it. plan to spend quite a chunk of time to get this done. (of course, this also presupposes that you have already downloaded and installed MySQL. if not, i highly recommend using the source files and compiling them yourself. i have had mixed luck with installing the binaries. some folks may have had better luck with these. there has been a few scattered messages on this list about installing ZMySQLda -- check the archives for these. i received a very helpful response over the weekend on an aspect of doing this. hope this helps. good luck. ciao! greg. DBA/web programmer Venaca, LLC