If you have followed the advice of the previous post on ACL then you should have some code that permits you to put in place ACL checks for your site with very little effort. There is however still the other side of ACL to do and that is the (potentially) significant effort of setting up your ACL rules.

As I mentioned in that post I was going to provide a live demo as always, the source code for which you can download from the demos tab at the top of the page.

The code was based on the ACM plugin, but is completely rewritten with some enhancements - especially to the way access control objects are defined. It is not perfect and I removed any extra javascript code for simplicity, I would welcome comments and even contributions ;).

So, you read the manual but how to put in place access control for the sensitive content of your site still eludes you. Have no fear, this post is for you. A while ago I wrote a descriptive blog on the difference between authentication and access control, it didn't go into code details but in it I mentioned that i would write a tutorial on ACL if the question was still floating around in the future - well here is that tutorial.

This blog will cover a few basic concepts and how to set up your application to permit access control, in the next part I will show how easy it is to administer your access control lists including a demo