News
The development on this has kinda dropped off for a while. I've got a lot of other projects I'm working on and this just hasn't gotten priority recently. The fact that we weren't able to get a league up and running doesn't make me any more anxious to finish this either. Well, we'll see what happens in the future.
So, the error logs got a few minor changes. Also, the permission system is working completely. Also, I changed the layout to a totally custom one. I'm still working on the color scheme a bit though. The width will probably change when the extra content gets added. We'll have to see how it looks when that gets added. For now it looks kinda funny at full width for just blog posts.
Well, I ran into a bit of a problem with the error handling and logging functions so they have been completely redesigned. Everything is working great now though. I've also started work on the access control features. Users are checked for access rights to each page automatically before the page loads. Content access control will be applied within the controller logic as needed. Hopefully I can finish up a lot of that tonight.
For the next revision I'll be working on two more framework classes. I need to flush out the User class. Right now it really only supports login() and logout(). So, I'll be adding user management features. Things like adding/removing users, locking/unlocking accounts, setting personal information, registering a new user, etc. Also on the list is the Access Control class. I will be using Cake's built-in ACL component to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but I'll be writing the wrapper class to provide management functions. There are basically three ARO groups that users can be a part of: Admin, User, or Anonymous. Then, there are two types of ACO: controller/action, and content based. Access will be first tested against the controller/action. If that passes, then the content checks will take place.
Just finished the global error handling and logging class. The site logs general request statistics, warnings, and errors. There are functions for logging errors silently, flashing messages to the user, and black-holing any request. This version also has improved output encoding, although the html output encoding isn't finished yet. Currently everything is getting encoded. I need to whitelist a few html tags that will be important for formatting posts.
I've finished the updates that I mentioned in the last post. More of the blog functionality is now available. The next step will be to lockdown my output encoding module. The framework takes care of any sql injection (or it should anyway), but I'm still going to back it up with my own functions. Also, I need to get the html encoding done to get rid of any potential xss vulnerabilities. It's not going to be too much longer before the blog component will be finished enough to begin work on the actual league managment components. Edit: I should mention that the site is now running this release of the code.
This site isn't running the newest version yet, but it has been progressing nicely. In the latest nightly builds I've greatly improved the posting mechanism, and I've begun work on a dedicated admin section of the site. Categories are working in a limited fashion, and Posters can modify the time of day that the post lists as a published time. The next step is to only display posts that have a post date in the past. This will allow users to pre-date posts and have them show up just when the time is right.
This site is running an early version of the blog component of the Broomball League Manager that I'm developing. It is built on CakePHP I'm planning on releasing it under some open source license, but I haven't settled on one yet. This site will not only run the latest stable code, but I will be posting updates on the coding process.