Frequently asked questions

How can I implement membership approval?

A common task is to make site membership conditional, for example to only allow paying users to login. This can easily be implemented by modifying your :py:obj:Products.membrane.interfaces.IMembraneUserAuth` implementation to perform extra checks.

The most common approach is to use a custom workflow to manage this. As an example we can use a simple workflow with two states:

• unpaid: initial workflow state, indicates that the user has not paid his subscription.
• paid: workflow state for users with a valid payment.

You can check the workflow state in your authenticateCredentials method. Here is a basic example:

from Products.CMFCore.utils import getToolByName

def authenticateCredentials(self, credentials):
    # Check the workflow to see if the user paid his membership
    wt = getToolByName(self, 'portal_workflow')
    review_state = wt.getInfoFor(self, 'review_state')
    if review_state=='unpaid':
        return None

    # The user paid, so do the normal authentication
    if credentials['password']==self.password:
        return (self.UID, self.login)
    else:
        return None