[Zope] Best practice to keep userinfo in MySql, session management and per-user data?

[Heimo Laukkanen]

First of all I have to say WOW. Thank you guys at Digicool for creating
amazing toll like Zope, and thank you people for writing nice howto's to
help newbies. I started working with Zope about three weeks ago and now
I am building two intranets and clients website with Zope. Here are some
questions that I would like to get answered.

1. Userdata ( passwords, roles , etc. ) in database

MySqlUserFolder seems to be a product that has been recently updated and
under development. Has anyone stumbled into problems with this product,
and/or is there some other product that I should be using? LoginManager,
UserDB-folder?

Comments truly appreciated, since I need solutions quite fast and would
not like to waste time in too many unnecessary efforts.

2. Session management and storing user-data

While doing development with PHP I got used to the sessions, which were
done quite nicely in php4 - meaning support for cookies and url-rewrite.
I noticed that there is development in Zope also to support sessions,
but reading documents is quite confusing and finding the latest status
of development is hard. It seems that cookie-support is ok, but is there
yet URL-rewrite - and will there be one?

What is the best way to start using session-management now? It seems
that also mysqluser-folder has some sort of session management. What is
the best practise to start development - and what will the development
of session management be in future?

What is the best way to store data about the user in Zope, meaning about
preferences user has, likes and dislikes etc. I know this could be done
with relational database or creating an object for each user - and keep
info in attributes etc. Once again -- help needed to get me on my way.


3. Multilanguage sites / products

zzLocal seems to atleast one tool to do this. What is the best practise
to start developing multilanguage sites and products? 

4. Smb-userfolder

Sound cool, has anyone this on production use? I'm not that familiar
with windows-nt credentials, but I assume that these work only in NT and
w2000? What I am trying to do is to run cool authentication for
intranet, but our network has users with W2000, Linux and 98 machines. 

If anyone could pointout to a microsoft-link about this topic I would
also appreciate.


Well that was a bunch of questions for now. If you can help, thank you
in advance!

-huima