You could be forgiven for thinking that I've not been up to much lately, after all it's a month or so since I wrote something on my blog. However that's not the case, and I have in fact been quite busy making changes here and there.

New Cakeforge Project

One of the things I have been looking at is how to better manage the content of this site, as the cost of progress is that bugs can creep into code. Some of these bugs have manifested themselves in such a way as to debilitate completely the interesting contents of this site for visitors. To ensure that there is always a version of the ACL admin plugin available to download, I have created the acl-admin cakeforge project to host the files. As such the online demo and download from this site will be a preview of changes that may appear in the cakeforge project.

If you use MPTT tables anywhere (The cake acl system uses it) you may have found that when you delete an entry, the lft and rght fields for the neighouring nodes don't get updated. This may have rather dire concequences ;)

There is an open ticket for how to delete from the cake acl tables, but as it is potentially quite generic, I thought I'd include the (potential) fix here. Below are two versions of a delete method, one takes care of associations, and the other doesn't:

Should anybody use this and find it causes a problem please let me know.

Rant Alert

There have been a number of debates in the Google group about Authentication and how it can be done. There is a vast amount of confusion (IMHO).

So what is Authentication?

I searched the internet and found a defenition which should be of use:

Authentication is any process by which you verify that someone is who they claim they are. This usually involves a username and a password, but can include any other method of demonstrating identity, such as a smart card, retina scan, voice recognition, or fingerprints. Authentication is equivalent to showing your drivers license at the ticket counter at the airport.

Apache Manual