Products.PlonePAS (4.0.8)

This product adapts the PluggableAuthService for use by Plone. PAS is a UserFolder replacement that allows any part of its functionality to be augmented or replaced by simple plugins. The architecture allows for customizers to adapt any aspect of membership—memberdata, groups, roles, user, authentication strategy and many other aspects of user data source integration. It is also shared between Zope Corp. products, CPS and now Plone. Some interesting possibilities with PlonePAS:

• NTLM Authentication (automatically signing into a system if you are on a windows domain)
• Mixing and matching group sources (ZODB/RDBMS/LDAP) with user sources (ZODB/RDBMS/LDAP)
• Handling properties in an RDBMS system
• Being able to know if a property is mutable in the datasource (only available in PlonePAS)
• Search based interface for users/groups
• Ability to easily add custom behavior by simply adding a plugin and turning it on

Installation

PlonePAS installs like any other Plone Product, but please note: it does replace your existing portal user folder. There is automatic migration, but this is not tested against setups other than GRUF+ZODB UserFolder. It may work for other userfolders or sources, but it will end up storing all users in the ZODB, regardless of original user source.

(For instance, an exUserFolder user source in GRUF that goes to a database may be migrated, but will not be attached to the database anymore. If you have plugins that will replicate your original functionality, it will not hurt to simply delete the existing plugins.)

But whatever you do, if you decide to install this Product, please, please, please back up your site. The authors cannot guarantee that PlonePAS will not stomp your site into mush and then eat it. You should be doing this anyway, but it is especially important here.

YOU MUST BACK UP BEFORE INSTALLATION.

And don't throw the backup away until you're really really sure that PlonePAS works for you. Please note: there is no automatic restoration on uninstall.

After installation, you may replace or reconfigure any of PAS's plugins.

For reference, the standard install procedure:

• Unpack the distribution file,
• place the PlonePAS/ directory in your Zope instance's Products/directory,
• restart Zope.
• In each Plone instance, go to the QuickInstaller (portal_quickinstaller in ZMI, or "Add/Remove Products" in the Plone Setup) and install it.