ZODBGroupManager vs portal_groups - any problems using both?

Question

I've seen that I can do pretty much the same with them about creating and editing groups: but when I change a group title (not id) programatically, the title I changed is only shown on prefs_groups_overview (and at /Plone/acl_users/source_groups/manage_workspace) when I use ZODBGroupManager.updateGroup to change it: using portal_groups.editGroup it changes the title, but isn't reflected on those two urls I provided.

Which should I use? Are there any problems using portal_groups to add groups and ZODBGroupManager to edit it's titles since ZODBGroupManager is the only one that changes the titles in the urls above? Will I have problems using both of them?

(I'm using Plone 3.3.5. This bug has been fixed on 4.X. (prefs_groups_overview), but I would like to know if there are problems using ZODBGroupManager since I'm stuck with 3.3.5.)

Answer 1

One is a PAS plugin (ZODBGroupManager) that ships with PAS (the Pluggable Auth service). The other is a portal tool (portal_groups) that ships with PlonePAS (a collection of code and PAS plugins that are Plone-specific.)

You can think of portal_groups as "higher up" and ZODBGroupManager as "lower down" (in the software stack) if that helps (because the former is a portal tool that has a UI representation in Plone, whereas the latter does not).

Via that "high/low" logic, you could say portal_groups is "better" because it's managed by Plone. But I would personally use either/or however you see fit, and not worry too much about problems.