Access Control for all (Part 3)
20 Dec 2006
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...
Access Control for all (Part 2)
05 Oct 2006
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 ...
Access Control for all (Part 1)
04 Oct 2006
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...
Return of the Demos
24 Sep 2006
A brief not to say that I'll be putting a couple of Demos back on the site, and I'll be adding to the main demo page as I go. All of the demos will be put up as plugins.
The pagination demo and source has always been available, and adding to that, the the next example is the Title tutorial. A very simple example based on the original tutorial from the wiki...
Change the config at run time
18 Sep 2006
Following on from my previous post, I thought I'd mention a similar use that can make a developers life a little easier. Usually when developing software there are at least 3 environments: Development, Test and Production. For larger projects there may be more, but for a simple website (and a tiny team of 1) there is often 2 environments: the one on the development machine...
One Database file - two servers
16 Sep 2006
If you have your website on one server for testing/development (like this laptop) and your live site on another, it's quite likely that once in a while your database.php file from one or the other will find itself referring to the wrong database. Over at With Cake a solution was proposed to allow you to switch database sources in the app model, however it might be easier to...
Prevent Robots from accessing an action
11 Sep 2006
If, like on this site, you have some demo applications with some data in them, it's wise to try to ensure that the test data you spent an hour or two creating doesn't get deleted.
For the demos that were on this site (they'll be coming back after some tweaking) I set up a script to run once per hour to truncate and reimport the test data - thus ensuring that malicious...
The power of logs
07 Sep 2006
One of the changes I made to my site recently, was to override the App Error Function to keep track of how things are going wrong. I did this by simply logging all the information available and redirecting the user to a safe page (the home page).
I've found this to be very useful in general, especially for debugging what was going wrong with multiple inter-plugin...