Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Shimmie Extension - User Permissions

This is a three-in-one.

User Permissions manages a more complex form of user permissions than can easily be done in Board Config. Basically, in default Shimmie you have three de-facto user groups: Admin, Registered, and Anonymous. Problem is, admin has access to everything, so if you wanted to let some registered users help police images and other user content, you'd have to trust them not to screw you with their admin access, up to and including de-admining your user.

Anyway, it started as an all-in-one that established user groups, default permissions, group-level permissions, and user-specific permissions. This got unwieldy very fast, especially since the user groups part was basically an extension in itself. So I split it in four pieces: User Groups, Global Permissions, Group Permissions, and User Permissions. As posted earlier, User Groups managed groups of users.

Global Permissions was basically a store of all the registered permissions, name, description, and default value.

Group Permissions built on top of Global, if there's a setting for the group level, it uses that, or falls back to global.

User Permissions builds on top of Group. Like Group, it falls back on groups the user is in if user level is unset (multiple settings for one permission are ORed together,) or to global if there are no groups with that permission set.

These were going to be separate extensions, with group and user being agnostic of each other (though depending on global.) Unfortunately, I could not figure out how I'd go about untangling the levels from each other, so I merged the three back together, partially. It has three separate extension definitions, each handling one level, and I could drop the need to have them able to work separately from each other.

So an extension can use this by registering options by hooking the PermissionRegisteringEvent and calling $event->register(String $key, String $name, String $description, Boolean $default), then later access the permissions applied to a user with Permission::user(User $user, String $key).

It's not as clean as the Config object, I admit. I want to have access to it through the User object since it would look like User::permission(String $key), but I also didn't want to require a code patch for core files. I was able to skip requiring the Config and Database objects from being passed in to Permission::user() by cheating and importing globals into the function.

Works well regardless, though it suffers from a bit of disuse. So far there are only 2 extensions that use it.

GitHub Repository
Commit at time of post: 14735d34
Dependencies: Simple Extension, User Groups

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