[Zope] Password Overlap

[Dan Shafer]

I have painted myself into a nifty corner.

My client's site is protected at the root by an acl folder. Those who 
are not in the acl folder have view privileges only. This works fine.

I just added a new feature to my client's site. He wants this 
capability available to anyone to whom he gives a specific password. I 
wrote a Python script that generates the password and a page for my 
client to auto-generate a new random password and to see what the 
current password is. This works fine as well.

The problem is, since I'm not even asking people for a user name here, 
only a password, and since the site is protected from access via the 
acl folder, his clients can't get past the password screen because the 
acl logic presents a challenge for a user name and password which, of 
course, these folks don't have.

It occurred to me at one point that I could define an acl user called, 
e.g., "client" and then perhaps revise the Python script so that 
instead of storing the newly generated password in a DTML document, it 
would update the password property for that user in the acl folder. But 
it wasn't very obvious to me how to do that. And while I don't *mind* 
having them have to type in a generic user name, it's more elegant if 
they don't have to do so.

What's the easiest way to address this issue? I looked through a year's 
worth of email digests and I searched zope.org, but I couldn't find an 
answer.

Thanks.