[Zope3-dev] Question: Are principals (sometimes aka users) content or meta-content?

[Martijn Faassen]

Steve Alexander wrote:
> I can imagine adding a Content-space user folder that provides for 
> content-space management of users. Such a user folder is really a 
> "proxy" (in some broad sense) to the authentication service.

Another example from Silva -- in Silva we do this for groups management.
Who is a member of a group should be managed by people who only have
rights locally in some part of a Silva site. Group definitions however 
should be (for technical reasons among others) be available *globally*
in a Silva site. The group management object off in a folder somewhere allows
people with chief editor rights to manage who is in *that* particular group.

The group membership information is actually stored off in a service in the
Silva root, and this service can be replaced or extended in case group
membership is determined by other sources as well (such as LDAP or other
potentially dynamic sources). If a group management object is removed from
a folder somewhere in the site the group information is still available,
and can be attached to a new group management object somewhere else.

There are some thorny issues (the one with removing etc is one), but 
it's worked reasonably well for us so far.

Regards,

Martijn