Andy Chase

This morning I tried unsuccessfully to get CakePHP's built-in 'Access Control List' feature working. I get the impression that ACL is bleeding edge stuff, and that the current documentaion is not accurate (or it may be that the functionality just doesn't quite work right out of the box.) That's OK. CakePHP is still quite young, and for my current purposes ACL looked like overkill anyway.

So this afternoon I set about implementing my own lightweight user authentication system, incorporating 'Users' and 'Roles' tables in the database, with corresponding CakePHP controllers and associations. Scaffolding provided instant create/edit/list/delete functionality for users and roles, including the ability to assign roles to users and vice versa. Total set-up time: maybe 30 minutes for everything.

The bigger hurdle was implementing an authentication controller for handling the login form, logging in, and logging out. This took a bit longer, but at every turn I discovered that the typical minutiae (Setting a message to be displayed on the following screen, managing session variables, et cetera) had already been taken care of for me in the base Controller class, leaving me to spend most of my time worrying about logic instead of implementation. This is good stuff.

The next step will be to write a controller 'Component' for managing user access to controller functions.

Tagged:

• cakephp
• php
• framework