[Zope-CMF] Re: What is a member?

[Yuppie]

Hi Florent!


Some thoughts regarding your questions:

Florent Guillaume wrote:
> What is it really to be a member of a portal ?
> 
> 1) we have the Member role, but nowhere is it enforced that members must 
> be Member.

members represent users that are allowed to login to the portal and use 
features of the site that are not public. They might have different 
global or local Roles.

The 'Member' Role represents a basic set of Permissions common members 
have for the site. Sometimes this Role represents the least common 
denominator and all members have the 'Member' Role. In other cases 
members with Roles like 'Reviewer' or 'Manager' don't have a 'Member' 
Role. I would not enforce one policy.

> 2) the membership tool sometimes returns info (in searches for instance) 
> about the members it has seen before but without consulting the 
> underlying acl_users at all.

That could make sense if there is a user source with thousands of users 
and only some of them use the portal. In this case you can think of 
members as users that did login at least once. (Maybe a distinction 
sleeping vs. active members makes sense.)

> 3) in some cases members may have been created by joining (thus passing 
> through registration) but sometimes they come from an external user 
> source updated beyond the knowledge of Zope.
> 
> Note that for example the LDAPUserFolder has chosen to only return 
> "cached" users when one calls listMembers. I understand the reasons but 
> I consider it a big problem.

Would be nice if all these external user sources would
- store the member properties
- implement a search that returns Batch-like results

> In refactoring this stuff, I'd like to know who I should consider a 
> member for purposes of info returned by listMemberIds, listMembers, 
> searchMembers for instance.

I didn't close <http://zope.org/Collectors/CMF/189> because I'm not 
happy with the current state of searchMembers. searchMembers is only 
protected by 'List portal members' so it should not return a list of 
members without 'listed' flag true. For privacy as well as for 
performance reasons we should not return the whole list if no search 
string is specified. People should know pretty well what they are 
looking for. Maybe the search string should contain at least 4 
characters or something like that.

listMemberIds and listMembers are only useful for small sites or rare 
cases like sending newsletters to each member. In all other cases a 
Batch mode would be useful that returns only the members and the 
properties that should be displayed on the current page.


Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,
	Yuppie