Technology

In my recent post on using Zend_Acl with Doctrine record listeners, I described a way to automate a Doctrine-based application's access control logic based on certain event hooks in Doctrine's record listener system. I still think it's a fairly elegant approach, but as I've been working with it, I discovered one behavior I didn't quite expect.

Zend_Acl is a very powerful tool to help manage access control logic, but it can be a bit difficult to determine exactly where and how to use it.

In previous Zend Framework apps I've written, I often handled access control at the level of the controller action. Each action was represented in the ACL as a resource, and the ACL logic was applied by a custom plugin just prior to any action dispatch.

Although I've loved using Wordpress for the duration of this blog, recently I've been working on a custom replacement blog platform that I can host and maintain myself. This probably sounds odd, especially since there are already so many excellent blogging platforms available, but I've pushed ahead with it for a couple of reasons I think most developers will understand:

Following right on the heels of my weekend at DrupalCamp, I've stumbled across a few rather interesting blog posts on how Drupal is perceived in other parts of the PHP development community. Thought I'd post the links and make a few comments here, since the issues being discussed are pretty relevant to my day-to-day work as a web technology guy.

Well, all this weekend's adventures seem to have paid off pretty well; I'm back now from DrupalCamp Austin and I thought I'd go ahead and review some of the things I took away from it all.

I've been having a bit of trouble getting prepared for my upcoming deployment presentation at DrupalCamp Austin, but I've found that when I write things down, it really helps me understand them better. So, without further ado and in no particular order, here are some of the most helpful things I've learned about the Drupal features module in the last few weeks.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the November meeting of the DallasPHP user group; I've only attended sporadically so far due to how far away I live, but I decided I definitely needed to go to this one: they were talking about the Doctrine ORM, which is the database library behind this blog, and fast becoming one of my favorite open source tools.

A couple of weeks back Adrian Rollett (one of my co-workers in the CWS office) and I submitted a talk proposal for this coming weekend's DrupalCamp Austin; we've been doing a lot of Drupal deployment research at work lately, and thought it would be worth sharing what we've found.

Technology

This blog is powered by Blahg, a custom-built PHP 5 blogging solution leveraging such noted libraries as Zend Framework, Doctrine, TinyMCE and maybe some more I'm forgetting at the moment.

So, uh, some time ago when I wrote the last post in my home NAS tutorial (for reference, here's all previous posts in the series, I made a rather bold omission:

Once you’ve got the tunnel running (ideally you’d set it up to run automatically), all that’s left is to mount the NFS share(s) to appropriate locations in your filesystem. This process varies by operating system (even across UNIXes), so for now I’ll leave that up to you.