[Zope] NuxUserGroups -- any comments?

Joel Burton joel@joelburton.com
Tue, 13 Aug 2002 13:32:39 -0400


Installed NuxUserGroups to test as a possible solution for a client's
user-management needs. If you're not familiar with this product, it adds
a "group" concept in Zope, so that users can be associated with 0 or
more groups. These groups can then have local roles assigned to them.
The advantage of this is pretty clear: if I want to give all accountants
privileges in the accounting subfolder, I have to either (a) add them as
users in accounting/acl_users, which means they may be defined in two
places (a pain when it comes to user management, password changes,
etc.), or (b) add a local role for each accountant individually, which
becomes a pain if the list of accountants changes often, or (c) give all
accountants the role "Accountants", which becomes unwieldy if you have
more than a few groups.

NuxUserGroups allows me to make all the accountants have a normal role
(Member, Staff, whatever), and belong to the group Accountants. I can
then give the Accoutants group the local role of Manager (or whatever)
wherever I want. If Bob moves from Accounting to HR, I just have to
switch his groups in the one user folder--not track down his user in
several places or change lots of local roles.

A very good idea. My concern about using this is that it patches some
fairly deep stuff, and I'm anxious that it may not work well with other
custom products, future versions of Zope, etc.

There's been a little bit of traffic here in the past few months about
NuxUserGroups, but none that seems to address these, more basic,
questions:

  What's the current blessed opinion about this? Do you use it?
  Does it work seamlessly? Would you recommend it?
  
Thanks for any input.

- J
-- 

Joel BURTON  |  joel@joelburton.com  |  joelburton.com  |  aim: wjoelburton
Independent Knowledge Management Consultant