specializing in digital media technologies

I wanted to write up a strong post on Access Control Lists in Yii, for controlling who can do what in an application. I still will, of course, but since authorization depends upon authentication, I thought it necessary to discuss Yii’s authentication system first. And, as happens with me, in writing about that, and how you would customize the authentication process, 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. (continue reading…)

I’m just not a big fan of using the Zend Framework as my Web development tool, but one of the framework’s nicest features is that you can use only the parts of it you need. I am, however, a big fan of the Yii framework and one of its many plusses is that you can easily integrate other frameworks and tools into it. Like, for example, the Zend Framework. Yii does not have its own search engine functionality, and Apache’s Lucene is arguably the gold standard (although clearly not the only choice), so tapping into Zend’s Lucene module for a Yii-driven site makes a lot of sense. In this post, I’ll walk you through the steps for integrating  Zend_Lucene into Yii. This post does assume familiarity with PHP, MVC, and Yii. (continue reading…)

I’ve created three Yii-driven PHP sites in the past few months, each of which required an administrative area to dynamically manage the site’s content. Much of the content can contain some HTML, including media (images, videos, etc.), typography, lists, and so forth. So that non-technical people can create nice-looking HTML, I use a Web-based WYSIWYG editor like FCKEditor or TinyMCE. Getting either to work within the Yii environment isn’t too hard, once you know what to do. But because assembling the disparate parts can be tricky, I outline the specific steps and requirements in this post. Note that the post does assume familiarity with Yii. (continue reading…)