[Zope-CMF] Remembering things about members

[Jonathan Corbet]

Work continues on my "make CMF look like LWN" project.  

Among other things, LWN news items carry a "category" attribute (like
"kernel").  I've created a derivative NewsItem with that attribute, and a
CategoryTool class for managing categories.  So far so good.

I would like to let members set up category filters so that they see only a
subset of the news.  For example, a surprising number of people don't want
to see security-related items.  It seems that it should be possible to set
up a filter property in the MemberData class, and perhaps even feed it
directly to the catalog when looking up stuff to display.

But I'm most curious about one thing: the "portal_skin" property is handled
through a cookie, rather than by querying the membership database.  That
means that it doesn't carry across browsers or systems.  I figure there
must be a good reason for this implementation, and I would like to
understand that that reason is before I start adding properties of my own.
Does anybody have a clue they could lend me on this one?

Thanks,

jon

Jonathan Corbet
Executive editor, LWN.net
corbet@lwn.net