Illustration by Brendan Davis

CSS enables you to provide different views of your website so end users can choose which view they prefer.

Security is an important part of most websites - especially if they provide some content that should be accessible only by registered users. Zope already provides standard security with the Zope user folder.

However, sometimes you might want to store more information about the users or have the user folder react differently than what is possible with the Zope user folder. In that case you can either use one of the existing user folder products or write your own product that suits you best.

This article deals with how to use the existing python code of the Zope user folder to create your own user folder. There will be a simple example of how to create an extra property that for users.

Zope's authentication mechanism is defined in the lib/python/AccessControl directory in your Zope installation. Here, you find modules such as Role.py, Permission.py and User.py. The module User.py contains several classes that make up the user folder and all it's function. The classes are as follows:

BasicUser SimpleUser SpecialUser User UnrestrictedUser NullUnrestrictedUser BasicUserFolder UserFolder

The BasicUser class is the super-class for the other user classes. It defines the basics for the authentication and provides interfaces for methods concerning the user information. These methods need to be implemented by any class that sub-classes the BasicUser class.

The SimpleUser class defines all methods that are needed to add, edit and delete a simple user. This is the class that you should sub-class from if you want to make only small changes to the standard Zope user, such as adding a new field for user information.

The SpecialUser class is for users such as the emergency user and nobody. It overwrites the getId() method.

The User class is a sub-class of the SimpleUser class and is used for the standard Zope user. It doesn't have any methods but only exists because of sub-classing. The UnrestrictedUser class is for users that are to pass all security checks. It overwrites the methods allowed(), hasRole() (deprecated), has_role() and has_permission(). Users of this class can only be restricted by methods defined in the Owner.py module.

The NullUnrestrictedUser class is mostly for backward compatibility so that third party user folder implementations that expect an emergency user to exist in Zope will still work.

The BasicUserFolder class contains the methods for authorization and authentication as well as the methods for managing a simple user.

The UserFolder class sub-classes the BasicUserFolder and adds persistent mapping to it.

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