, I introduce Access Control Lists (ACLs), Yii’s default way of restricting who can take what actions. This is a key part of the security of any Web application. For example, a site’s content can often be read by anyone at all, registered or non-registered users alike (like the text you’re reading now). Some content may only be viewable by registered users and some by registered users of a certain type (e.g., paid members). Finally, some content may only be viewable by administrators. In this post, I detail how to completely control access to your Web application using Yii’s Access Control Lists.

, I walk through the Yii framework’s built-in authentication system for adding login functionality to a Web site. There are a number of files and components involved, but simple authentication works fine out of the box, or with just a little tweaking. That’s the focus of that previous post. In this post, I explain how you can customize the authentication process further.

, I had to break the subject down into two posts. So here’s the first of an informal three-part series on authentication and authorization in Yii. In this post, I discuss how the parts of Yii’s authentication system work together; much of what I say in this first post is also available in the Yii documentation, just not presented in this way. I also show a couple of quick ways to modify its behavior to suit your situation.

It’s the holiday season here in America, so I won’t be posting on my blog as much for the next two of weeks. I may sneak in a post or two if time and motivation allows, but…

As always, thanks for your interest in what I have to say! And happy holidays to those of you celebrating something this time of year!

In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• On the Blog => Learning the Yii Framework
• On the Web => Adobe’s BrowserLab
• On the Web => Zend Interviews
• Q&A => What do I need to know about SSL?
• Book Giveaway => PHP for the Web: Visual QuickStart Guide and Translations
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => Effortless Flex Development

About this Newsletter

Well, I didn’t get many replies to my previous newsletter, so either you’ve all stopped reading or the topics there just weren’t that interesting. I’ll try to do better here, although I’m trying to keep it short (as I always say, but this time I came closer). I suspect the book giveaway will merit some responses! As always, thanks for reading and please do let me know what comments and questions you have.

On the Blog => Learning the Yii Framework

I’ve recently wrapped up three Web sites that used the Yii framework (for PHP). I have not historically been much of a framework person, but after working with the Zend Framework for a while, I found and fell for Yii. I wrote a series of posts on how to start using Yii on my blog. The creator of Yii himself has read the series and found it useful enough to add a link to it to the Yii documentation pages. If you’re curious about using Yii, or just want to see some highlights of what it’s like to work with, head to my blog (and there’s also a series on MVC there, which is useful when working with frameworks).

This video at Adobe’s Web site previews two of the file system additions forthcoming in Adobe AIR 2.0. It’s only six minutes long but shows some cool new features for launching files and for accessing mounted drives. The specific code being used is Flex, but the same functionality will be capable using Ajax, too.