Today Andrew Eddie posted a useful explanation of the new ACL (Access Control) he is building for Joomla 1.6.
Whilst Andrew has tried to explain a difficult concept it was still written by a developer for developers.
So I thought I would have a go at translating it into "normal" speak.
Like any ACL system it is based on
- actions
What can someone do e.g. read, edit, install - assets
What can you do it on e.g. News category - users
Who can do it e.g. Peter, Paul, Mary
Thankfully both assets and users can be grouped together to simplify things and reduce the workload in setting things up for your web site.
That means you can combine a set of assets into one group if they are going to be used by one user or a group of users.
For example on a Newspaper web site I put all my sports writers in a user group called sports-writers and put my football, rugby, netball and baseball categories in an asset group called sports-assets.
Now that we have our actions, assets and users we have to create the rules. These rules are the glue that stick everything together and give us our ACL (access control)
At the time of writing there are three different rule types but I guess these may be added to in the future. They don't have any clever names right now they are just Rule Types 1, 2 and 3. Perhaps they could be called jobs I'm not sure.
- Type 1 - A user group can perform some sort of Action
(e.g. Administrator group can install Templates) - Type 2 - A user group can perform an Action on an Asset
(e.g.. sports-writers can Create or Edit content in the rugby category) - Type 3 - A user group can perform an Action on an Asset Group
(e.g. sports-readers can View content in the sports-assets group)
The concepts appear to be solid and easy to understand and I can see that groundwork for the required code is all done. The challenge, and it is a big challenge is to provide a user interface to the system that lets you easily set everything up.
Things are really starting to take shape now.
