User and group management: Out of the box

For many organizations, a few users (in a few groups with a few roles) are enough to satisfy their content-publishing needs. Other organizations may have more complex needs, and may require more than the out of the box (OOB) feature set.

In this chapter, we will focus on LDAP integration to handle these needs. However, let us cover the out of the box feature set first.

The Zope 2 administrator account

The Zope 2 administrator is a user at the Zope 2 application root level that has the Manager role. You will need this user at least initially to use Plone (for example, to create a Plone site object).

Conveniently, the plone.recipe.zope2instance recipe (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plone.recipe.zope2instance) assists us with the creation of a Zope 2 administrator.

All you have to do is to configure the user parameter in the instance section of your Buildout configuration file, and run Buildout:

[instance]
…
user = admin:admin

However, note that this user exists...