[Zope] Is there any way to turn off the publishing of externalmethods to the web in Zope?

[Mark, Jonathan (Integic)]

"""Excuse me for saying, but this is all slightly nuts.
Is there some reason you're being so (overly) paranoid?

Chris"""

I don't know Zope well, even though I have been using Chris's excellent Squishdot product for three years at Goodbyejim.com. Chris has moved on to other Zope activities and has not upgraded Squishdot since 2001. That is a blessing in disguise, because it is time to write my own Zope 2.10 blogging product that relies on Web 2.0 concepts of using third parties and web standards (Haloscan, Atom, CSS ZenGarden, Cheetah templating) to provide what was built in to Squishdot. 

As many of us know, BDFL Guido doesn't seem to think much of Zope. He allegedly feels that Zope forces one to learn Zope instead of Python. There is some truth to that. My goal is to leverage Zope's ZMI and CMS features while doing as much work as possible in Python and Python scripts. 

I thus object philosophically to ZPT and DTML and hope to avoid them in my product, which should be released on Zope.org to a probably indifferent Zope world some time later this year. I can use Cheetah as an external method with Python scripts, instead of ZPT and DTML. 

My attempt to use Chris's Twiddler templating tool as an external method instead of Cheetah ran into a problem which I am sure was my fault, although Twiddler worked great from my Zope instance's Python command line. I didn't feel like figuring out what my mistake was. The Path of Least Resistance was to use Cheetah, and I believe that there is great wisdom in the Path of Least Resistance. Deviate from that path only to travel on the Path of Greater Wisdom. Twiddler and Cheetah appear equally wise, so PLR said go with Cheetah.

I want as much as possible of my Zope 2.10 blogging product (working name, Aristede, for which I own the Aristede.com domain name) to be visible in Python scripts and folder properties. External methods should be only a wrapper to Cheetah and to other Python modules that can't be imported into Python Scripts.

My paranoid nature is due to a fear of creating my own product and finding out that I have left a security hole. By using Eval in my external method I can avoid coupling the external method which calls Cheetah to the list of properties which I send Cheetah, and reduce the amount of code which I need to do it. But Eval is super dangerous to use. It is a trade-off between code simplicity and security. 

Hence my desire to make certain that no one can pass from inside a URL parameters which are later Eval'd to my external method.

I accept Chris's assurance that the Proxy tab in the ZMI is robust. And that if someone is able to crack it I could get Zope developers to fix it. That is sufficient for a blog application. It may not be sufficient for a medical records or a banking application, but I am not writing one of those. 

Therefore I will use the ZMI to restrict my external method to authenticated users. I will use the ZMI to proxy-as-authenticated the Python Script which calls the external user. That will be sufficient.