I'm also trying to decide on the best way to handle security, specifically restricting access to certain details to the appropriate people. CakePHP provides low-level support for a few methods, but generally leaves the details to the application. All of the options discussed below are predicated on a common login component, which I've already sorted out how to handle in a plug-in manner that will work in a stand-alone environment but also allow easy integration with Zikula, Drupal, etc.
One common way, which I've used in other apps, is what they call "admin routing", whereby administrative actions have URLs that would look like /leaguerunner/admin/field/edit/1, while normal actions have URLs like /leaguerunner/field/view/1. This is great for apps where admin actions are completely separated from "unauthorized" actions, but I started down this road and found that it doesn't map well for Leaguerunner. The second most common option is for the various controllers to do their own security checking (using the tools provided by CakePHP). This is perhaps the closest to how Leaguerunner currently works, but there are problems with this. In particular, the code for things like checking whether the current user is allowed to see another person's contact information is quite complex. The third method is to use CakePHP's ACL (access control list) component. This requires setting up ACOs (access control objects, for example a person's contact information), AROs (access request objects, basically just users and groups), and then providing varying levels of access (create, read, update, delete) for AROs accessing ACOs. This is a very powerful and flexible system (though it doesn't provide for a user being in multiple groups, which seems like a significant oversight), and the security checks are pretty much all handled by the framework, moving the complex decision logic out of the controllers. However, it requires a carefully crafted set of permissions and, more significantly, careful synchronization of those permissions. I think that, technically, this is the best solution; however, it does create the steepest learning curve for casual developers looking to tweak their Leaguerunner installation or contribute to the project in general. As always, comments are very welcome. Greg. _______________________________________________ Leaguerunner mailing list [email protected] http://www.dmo.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/leaguerunner
