README

ABSTRACT

GroupUserFolder is a kind of user folder that provides a special kind of user management. Some users are "flagged" as GROUP and then normal users will be able to belong to one or serveral groups.

STRUCTURE

Group and "normal" User management is distinct. Here's a typical GroupUserFolder hierarchy:

     - acl_users (GroupUserFolder)
     |
     |-- Users (GroupUserFolder-related class)
     | |
     | |-- acl_users (UserFolder or derived class)
     |
     |-- Groups (GroupUserFolder-related class)
     | |
     | |-- acl_users (UserFolder or derived class)

So, INSIDE the GroupUserFolder (or GRUF), there are 2 acl_users :

The one in the Users object manages real users
The one in the Groups object manages groups

The two acl_users are completely independants. They can even be of different kinds. For example, a Zope UserFolder for Groups management and an LDAPUserFolder for Users management.

Inside the "Users" acl_users, groups are seen as ROLES (that's what we call "groles") so that roles can be assigned to users using the same storage as regular users. Groups are prefixed by "group_" so that they could be easily recognized within roles.

Then, on the top GroupUserFolder, groups and roles both are seen as users, and users have their normal behaviour (ie. "groles" are not shown), except that users affected to one or several groups have their roles extended with the roles affected to the groups they belong to.

Just for information : one user can belong to zero, one or more groups. One group can have zero, one or more users affected.

GROUPS BEHAVIOUR

...will be documented soon...

GRUF AND PLONE

See the dedicated README-Plone file.

BUGS

There is a bug using GRUF with Zope 2.5 and Plone 1.0Beta3 : when trying to join the plone site as a new user, there is a Zope error "Unable to unpickle object"... I don't know how to fix that now. With Zope 2.6 there is no such bug.