Posts tagged cms

Zend_Acl + Zend_Auth + Zend_Controller_Plugin = HAPPY!

15
1021 days
by in PHP, Zend Framework

Ok, so after playing around with Zend_Acl for what seems like forever I’ve finally cracked what feels like the perfect marriage between Zend_Acl, Zend_Auth and an application.

You may ask yourself, why the fuck is it so hard? The simple answer is this…

Zend_Acl was designed in such a way that it does not require any particular backend technology such as a database or cache server for storage of the ACL data. Its complete PHP implementation enables customized administration tools to be built upon Zend_Acl with relative ease and flexibility.

Ease and flexibility my arse! This is the reason quite a few Zend Developers are just pulling their hair out day in day out. The documentation at zendframework.com by far is the most confusing I’ve ever seen and quite a bit of it is outdated. It’s actually easier reading through the API documentation and trolling through the code than it is reading this stuff. I truelly feel sorry for people using ZF in anything less than ZendStudio or an IDE without the code completion. Authentication and Authorisation are pretty key aspect of any application, if they made it simple for people to set up they wouldn’t need a 2 paragraph section saying how to store the data by serializing it. Any way, rant over!

The Solution

There are many ways to store the ACL data for persistence, but I think that’s the problem. As soon as you hear the words store and persistance the bells and whistles in your head are screaming at you telling you to store it in a database just like in CakePHP. For months I’d been trying to work out a way to do this until last night.

Why not put this in the application configuration (application.ini)? This is application configuration after all! What’s the point in taking a hit on your database every time you want to check authorisation and then having to write caching code to counteract that? It’s counterproductive and not cost effective (thanks Kennedy stole your phrase).

We can then read the configuration from ini file which contains all of our Resources and Roles.

To begin I set my self some conditions:

  1. Whatever the solution is, it has to be decoupled from the rest of the application apart from the models used for the user obviously.
  2. It has to be piss easy to implement
  3. It has to be so easy to implement my mum could do it!

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0
1248 days
by in PHP

Over at fishrod we’re developing our new CMS based on the new Zend Framework 1.7 (biting our nails for 2.0 to be released so we can relax for at least 3 months). One of the issues that always arises when developing a Content Management System for our clients is the amount of flexibility we want to offer them, and how generic the CMS has to be whilst still being flexible.
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