ACL at page level

I've been messing around with CakePHP's built in ACL functionality. I tried it a while back (2007), but just couldn't make sense of it. Now, following Mark Story's tutorial in the Cake Book (and also his blog: http://mark-story.com/posts/view/auth-and-acl-an-end-to-end-tutorial-pt-1 ) , I have it working. He makes it very easy.

Now I'm tinkering with it to make it work on a page level. Success at this will mean I can use the CMS to create admin pages as well as public pages. When I've sussed it, I'll publish.

Converting dates between MySql and PHP

$mysqldate = date( 'Y-m-d H:i:s', $phpdate );
$phpdate = strtotime( $mysqldate );

htaccess tips

http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

CakePHP, .htaccess and clean homepage urls

Sometimes we need a clean url for the homepage to appear in the browser address bar, e.g. www.example.com

This problem came up with the CMS system I have built as all the pages have a url/name. For example, the default homepage would show as www.example.com/homepage.

Typing www.example.com would redirect to this and change the displayed url. The desired behaviour is to redirect

www.example.com -> www.example.com/homepage but only display www.example.com.

On the other hand, if you were to type www.example.com/homepage the display should stay as www.example.com/homepage .

The answer means a slight change to the default CakePHP .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]

becomes
RewriteRule ^$ homepage [L]

Of course, homepage could be any page name that you want to be the anchor page.