I think I am going to go ahead an implement LiveUser as the user authentication/premissions system for cataBlog before I release it in to the wild.
The only down side to using LiveUser is one more dependency. There are many upsides though.
LiveUser is pretty similar to how I already had permissions and authentication set up. However I have been basing a user’s permissions on the categories, and there have not been user groups.
By using LiveUser I should be able to assign permissions for both categories and individual pages. This will be very cool since I will be able to have multiple blogs in a category and users will be able to have write permission to one blog and not the others within a category.
I will also be able to have user groups. This will mostly be helpful for maintaining the default user group.
About LiveUser:
taken from http://pear.php.net/package-info.php?pacid=126
The LiveUser class takes care of the login process and can be configured
to use a certain permission container and one or more different auth containers.
That means, you can have your users’ data scattered amongst many data containers
and have the LiveUser class try each defined container until the user is found.
For example, you can have all website users who can apply for a new account online
on the webserver’s local database. Also, you want to enable all your company’s
employees to login to the site without the need to create new accounts for all of
them. To achieve that, a second container can be defined to be used by the LiveUser class.
You can also define a permission container of your choice that will manage the rights for
each user. Depending on the container, you can implement any kind of permission schemes
for your application while having one consistent API.
Using different permission and auth containers, it’s easily possible to integrate
newly written applications with older ones that have their own ways of storing permissions
and user data. Just make a new container type and you’re ready to go!
Currently available are RDBMS containers using PEAR::DB.
More are soon to follow.
More Links:
LiveUser page at pear.php.net
LiveUser homepage
I will write more about my experience with LiveUser as I get further along in the implementation process. I have been watching LiveUser for a while and hope to use it in many different applications. I joing the development list a while back with hopes that I will be able to contribute to the development of LiveUser, but first I have to implement it in an application.
-Jackson
