[Zope-CMF] RFC: PAS and the (non?) future of members

[J Cameron Cooper]

Rob Miller wrote:

> i'm wondering if it's not time to rethink the entire idea of members as
> they currently exist in CMF.  members were originally a necessary evil,
> because the user folder implementation of users didn't allow for enough
> flexibility to support CMF's needs.  now, however, PAS makes it possible
> to encapsulate all of the necessary behaviour in the user objects
> themselves, and it should be possible to eliminate the complexity of
> wrapping the user object altogether.
> 
> over the last few days at the snow sprint here in austria i've been
> working on a Plone-based product called Membrane.  Membrane implements PAS
> plugins which allow portal content to be used as the authentication,
> property, group, role, etc. providers for users.  it's quite nice, i
> think, very flexible and powerful, and i think it contains ideas that
> might do well in CMF itself.
> 
> even if the content-based plug-ins are not desireable, i think it's still
> worth investigating the use of PAS and the idea of deprecating the
> member/user duality altogether.  anyone else interested in this approach?

The whole wrapped-Member thing is indeed quite nasty, and PAS should let 
us bypass it quite easily. I suspect a 1:1 replacement of members with 
users from a special PAS UserFactory plugin would be quite easy. And, 
like members, it would be specific to CMF. Hooray for plugins.

PlonePAS doesn't do this (yet) since it aims to be minimally invasive.

But I think Membrane would be even better, provided it works out well 
and doesn't turn out to be quite so strangely behaved as CMFMember; 
members-as-content seems a quite natural thing to do.

		--jcc
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