[Zope-dev] Better user management: Usership vs. Membership

[Jonas Juselius]

Hello,

I had a look at the Membership product, but I could not get it to work. It
seems that the PortalMember ZClass in the PortalMembership Product inherits
from _ZClass_for_LoginUser, which is no longer in the LoginManager... But
actually I don't care... I tried to contact Bill about the Membership Prod,
but he seems to be unreachable because his mail address doesn't work. 

I found many nice ideas in the Membership product, and I think it would really
be a good idea to develop it further. Does anybody know about any recent
developments or what the current status is? Is there going to be a new
release soon, is anyone even working on the Membership product?

I also looked in dev.zope.org, and found proposals about a new user management
system for Zope. Does anybody know anything about this? 

What I would like, is to take the Membership product and turn
it into a flexible 'Usership' product. This would mean simplifying the 
Membership by  removing all the joining stuff and the like, and instead 
concentrate on building a nice user management environment for user admins
(which need not necessarily be 'Manager'). Here is a list of things that I
would like to see:

* users would be able to log in via a nice login screen
* users have user info attached to them, which they may or may not change
* users can change their passwords 
* adding users is not automatic (the user manager adds and removes users)
* possibility to automatically create properly protected home dirs for users
* perhaps logging of user activity 

My main point is that I think most sites are not interested in Membership in a
Portal or half-Portal sense, but would like to be able to set up a nice env
for their content managers/designers and other users who just log in to access
restricted info like on an intranet...

One of my main concerns is that I'm wasting my time... Many of the underlying
products for a better user management system are still evolving rapidly, and
anything built on top of these, is likely to break many times. Also,
since there has already been discussions about a new user system, someone
might already be working on it, and have better ideas. I would also be
interested in hearing what DC has to say, and what their plans are...

Best regards, 
              jonas

-- 
	And what is good, Phaedrus,
	And what is not---
	Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

[ PGP public key: http://www.iki.fi/jonas/pubkey.asc ]