For the past few days, I’ve been working with the newest 1.3 release of CakePHP. It has been a while since I’ve used it, but it seems there are some great new features and some improved documentation.

I’ve been building a generic layer for a new app (and subsequent apps, hence the generic part), including user management, authentication, and user groups/roles. I’ve been trying to discern the most effective approach for implementing very customizable permissions. I am envisioning an interface similar to Drupal, where permissions are based on roles, but can be very specific. Additionally, I’d like to have support for individual user permissions when required as well.

I can see how I would accomplish this with ACL, and have also implemented a custom permissions component, but I keep wondering if there is anyway to achieve such detailed permissions without having to mix in the permissions as conditional statements and jumble up the logic.

I had more to the post, until I realized yet again that I could change directions. More to come when I refine this layer further…