[Zope-CMF] What is a member?

[Florent Guillaume]

What is it really to be a member of a portal ?

1) we have the Member role, but nowhere is it enforced that members must 
be Member.
2) the membership tool sometimes returns info (in searches for instance) 
about the members it has seen before but without consulting the 
underlying acl_users at all.
3) in some cases members may have been created by joining (thus passing 
through registration) but sometimes they come from an external user 
source updated beyond the knowledge of Zope.

Note that for example the LDAPUserFolder has chosen to only return 
"cached" users when one calls listMembers. I understand the reasons but 
I consider it a big problem.

In refactoring this stuff, I'd like to know who I should consider a 
member for purposes of info returned by listMemberIds, listMembers, 
searchMembers for instance.

In generalizing the mechanisms, I'm forced to decide what to do with all 
the folks in the portal's acl_users. Are they all members ? If not, what 
criterion would I use ? The only reasonable possibilities I see are:
- everyone is a member,
- only those with Member role are members.

Actually filtering on the Member role doesn't seem such a bad idea. Or 
maybe Manager too. Does anyone have use cases with members that are not 
Member ?

Opinions ?

Florent

-- 
Florent Guillaume, Nuxeo (Paris, France)
+33 1 40 33 79 87  http://nuxeo.com  mailto:fg at nuxeo.com