[Zope-dev] User Groups

[Florent Guillaume]

> I've just released NuxUserGroups 0.6.
> http://www.zope.org/Members/nuxeo/Products/NuxUserGroups/

To expand a bit on this announcement:

  - One main goal of this product is to make it easy to have
    "workgroups". You simply have to define one Role, say 'Workgroup
    Member', give it the permissions you want, and at the root of the
    folder acting as the workgroup work area you assign the local group
    role 'Workgroup Member' to the groups of users.

    Compare this with the usual way to do it up to now, where you have
    as many roles as there are workgroups, and where you basically have
    exactly the same permission mapping for all these roles.

  - For now I only use a class derived from UserFolder, but I'd like to
    make it possible for all third-party user folders to use groups, for
    instance to store them in LDAP or SQL or whatever.

    I'll need input about the user folders authors for this, but from a
    cursory reading of the code of exUserFolder, for instance, it will
    be pretty simple. We have to define a stable API of course and
    implement the backends.

  - Obviously I believe such a concept has its place in the core Zope
    (and things would be even cleaner there). When things stabilize a
    bit I'll prepare a branch with the code, if people don't have any
    objections.

Other miscellaneous things:

  - The speed impact should be pretty negligible (and with Richard's
    profiler now we'll even be able to measure it :-).

  - I tried a separation of acl_users and acl_groups, but this has a lot
    of problems as Groups and Users have to keep in sync their knowledge
    of each other ; acl_groups has no meaning without acl_users ; when
    you delete a user it has to inform acl_groups that the user is
    deleted, etc. All in all it was a false good idea.


Florent

-- 
Florent Guillaume, Nuxeo (Paris, France)
+33 1 40 33 79 10  http://nuxeo.com  mailto:fg@nuxeo.com