[Zope-CMF] What is a member?

[Dieter Maurer]

Florent Guillaume wrote at 2003-11-14 16:03 +0100:
 > 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.
 > 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.
 > 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.
 > 
 > 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.

In my view, a member is what you have member data for.

Some of these members may no longer be fully functional (because
their "User" part maintained in some "acl_users" has changed/no
longer exists). Nevertheless, I would call them members, just
maybe broken.

The "User" source (the "acl_users") may have much more users.
Most of them may simply be not interested in the portal
and therefore never logged in.
We have such a setup: a large corporate LDAP server knows
about lots of people but only a small part has rights to log in
and only some part of this ever did. The current CMF
creates Member Data when they log in for the first time.
I think it is natural to see this as a week form of becoming
a member.

-- 
Dieter