[Product-Developers] Re: [Plone-Users] Survey of membrane/rememberusers and stakeholders

[Jon Stahl]

> From: product-developers-bounces at lists.plone.org [mailto:product-developers-
> bounces at lists.plone.org] On Behalf Of Rob Miller

> there are some pain points here, however, which will need to be resolved
> before this can be touted as something viable for your typical Plone
> integrator type, someone w/o the time or skill to dig deeply into the guts of
> the user system:
> 
> - Plone needs to autogenerate some UI based on the user objects that PAS
> generates.  a lot of folks want to use remember just because they don't want
> to have to tweak their member profile pages for every member schema change.
> this only works when all of the member properties are coming from a single
> piece of content.  we should be able to wire up user properties from any
> arbitrary sources and have simple view and edit screens generated at the
> aggregate level, in front of PAS, instead of forcing this to be behind PAS.

+1.
 
> - the PAS search APIs are teh suX0r.  yes, i know that many of the user
> sources might not be able to support sophisticated user enumeration or
> searching.  but the APIs should be rich and able to support sophisticated
> searching, with the weaker plug-ins having the ability to opt-out of
> supporting all the features.  the current situation is that we have extremely
> weak searching APIs, and solutions that provide better support pretty much
> have to route around PAS entirely to expose their functionality.  the ideal
> would be to be able to make calls to the acl_users object which will iterate
> through the search plug-ins, transparently constructing queries against both
> an LDAP server and a member catalog because the searched-upon properties are
> spread across both sources.  this isn't going to happen without major
> improvements.  seriously, the current member searching capabilities are a
> joke.
>

+1, weak searching really causes lots of pain, and limits the ease with which Plone can be used to build sites that connect members to each other.  Which is becoming a bigger and bigger part of "online collaboration" stuff. 

:jon