While the ezpublish permission system is quite flexible from an admin's point of view, it leaves a lot to be desired from an user's point of view. For example, a user can't decide himself (not easily, anyway) who should be able to read the object he just created. Even in the plain old Unix permission model he gets to chose that (obviously root can override that, but administrators are 1:1 the same in ezpublish) up to a certain extent. Thus my desire to give this flexibility to users on an on off basis (obviously, in some cases you don't want to allow them this power, most likely when you're using approve workflows and things like that). After thinking about it for a while, I've decided that shoehorning a good model into the current permission system (like I did with ParentOwner which is comparably trivial) would be really really ugly and rather inflexible to boot. I then laid this to rest somewhere in the back of my mind until my interest in this got resparked when I read http://ez.no/community/forum/setup_design/make_robust_to_using_back_button_rather_than_cancel#msg90419 (the beginning of the discussion isn't quite related to this, but in the end it quickly converges towards this, in my mind anyway). When I first thought of this I figured that using sections in a clever way would work (and most likely it would, for simple private/public features) but after some thinking I've decided against that. At some point it dawned upon me that a custom ACL datatype would be perfect for this, the only change in the kernel would then be a hack to recognize this datatype and let it override some of the permissions if it exists in an object! Since the architecture is very flexible this way, I've been thinking that first I need to get the code stub to interface with the datatype into the kernel, after which the datatype can gradually be extended (obviously starting with a binary private/public option for reading, then writing, then adding something more like ACLs, possibly even groups).

The current draft system of eZ publish is partially being discussed in this thread of the ez.no Setup & Design forum. The actual problem is that a new draft is created when a user pushes the "edit" button. Afterwards the user can leave the edit page by using the browser's "back" button, leaving an unedited, unnecessary draft in the system.

From metapundit.net, there's a new post with a list of a few "PHP Do-Nots" that he's picked up over the years and wanted to share.

I realise I haven't thrown my PHP readers a bone for a while. Lately, unfortunately, all my experience has been with how not to do things. Some of this has been my own fault, but a really healthy percentage has come because I am maintaining one horrible project and rewriting another even more horrid. So, a few pointers for you l3et coders out there: Don't do any of this stuff.

Items on the list include less than thought out design and a lack of knowledge about how to properly use a database.

I've already gathered some experience in hacking the role system of eZ publish by writing the ParentDepth create policy limitation. Now I'm planning to write a similar hack to add limitations to the content/create and content/edit policies. I will call it CustomCheck.

After four works of hard work by my collegues (and only two by me) we finally released beta2 of the eZ components. Most of the work was spend on reviewing all components and unifying the API. As we deem a unified API very important we decided to spend a little more time on it, and thus we have no final release for Christmas. The final release of the components is now planned for January 2006 following RC1 about halfway through that month.

Sandro and Tobias wrote an article explaining some behind the scenes changes since beta 1. All changes can be seen in the ChangeLog.

Some time ago I had to modify one of our custom login handlers for eZ publish to make it update the last visited timestamp. The datatype however needed to remain backward compatible with older eZ publish releases.

In the last week of November and the first week of December I had my holiday, which I choose to spend in South East Asia. The first stop was Singapore, where I have some family. That made it an exellent point to start my trip. The flight to Singapore is quite long from where I'm living and the 7 hour time difference is not very nice either. The moment I stepped out of the airport and into the taxi the rain started pouring down, topped off with a nice loud lightning strike - that was an excellent start.

Singapore is a very modern and western city, albeit it has a lot of eastern influences. Not only from the Chinese and Malay, but also from Tamils. Therefore in Singapore most signs are in 4 languages (English, which is still the primairy language, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and Malay). The influences from the other cultures are mostly visible in dedicated areas. There is Little India and of course China Town. Interestingly enough, the largest hindoe temple (to the right) is in China Town :).

When Stamford Raffles reached Singapore in the early 1800s he did not find a large bustling city that is now Singpare, but instead he found a lot of rain forest. There is still some of it left, in the northern part of the country, in a nature reserve called Bukit Timah where monkeys still roam freely (although they also pester you near the entrance of the park).

From Singapore we made a 6 day trip to Bangkok, which official name in Thai is "กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลก ภพนพรัตน์ ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์ มหาสถาน อมรพิมาน อวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะ วิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์". Bangkok is a whole different world compared to Singapore. Where Singapore is clean and modern, Bangkok is large and polluted and has a horrible traffic problem. The main attraction (atleast for me) is all the different temples (wat in Thai). As I like photography, all those temples are a nice subject to take shots of. At your left you find the 46 meter long reclining buddha at Wat Pho. Above is one of the decorations around the building housing the emerald buddha at Wat Phra Kaew. This temple lies on the Grand Palace premises, which houses a lot of other templates and the some buildings used for royalty. We visited the day before the King's birthday which unfortunately meant that some of the buildings were closed. Our hotel was close to Khaosan Road, which is a very vibrant area with lots of food stands and shops that sell fake stuff :). One temple that has quite a different style compared to the others is Wat Arun which you see here on the left. It's in Khmer style and covered with porcelain.

After 6 days we left Bangkok and prepared for our next trip. The next trip went to Bintan, an Indonesian island about an hour by ferry from Singapore. As Dutchie I needed to get a visa for Indonesia so we had to spend some annoying time at the Indonesian embassy in Singapore. We managed to retrieve our passport with the visa just in time before going to Thailand so we were all set to go.

Bintan is a small island and mostly leased by Singapore to put resorts on. We did not go to the North Western resort area but instead we went to Trikora Beach on the east side. We stayed at the Shady Shack which is definitely not a luxurious place. It did have running water (from a large tank) and electricity but that was about it. The main attraction was the nice beach on which our shacks were located. We were the only tourists there and it was very nice and quiet to relax on for a whole day. On the second day of our stay we walked to a nearby fishing village that was built on poles in the ocean. During the night the villagers go out fishing with their kelang (houses on floats) and during they day they would sell their fish in the village. Bintan gave me a small tan and I relaxed quite nicely. In the afternoon of the second day we went back to Singapore where I concluded my holiday.

For all the other pictures that I made during the trip see my gallery.

In the last week of November and the first week of December I had my holiday, which I choose to spend in South East Asia. The first stop was Singapore, where I have some family. That made it an exellent point to start my trip. The flight to Singapore is quite long from where I'm living and the 7 hour time difference is not very nice either. The moment I stepped out of the airport and into the taxi the rain started pouring down, topped off with a nice loud lightning strike - that was an excellent start.

Singapore is a very modern and western city, albeit it has a lot of eastern influences. Not only from the Chinese and Malay, but also from Tamils. Therefore in Singapore most signs are in 4 languages (English, which is still the primairy language, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and Malay). The influences from the other cultures are mostly visible in dedicated areas. There is Little India and of course China Town. Interestingly enough, the largest hindoe temple (to the right) is in China Town :).

When Stamford Raffles reached Singapore in the early 1800s he did not find a large bustling city that is now Singpare, but instead he found a lot of rain forest. There is still some of it left, in the northern part of the country, in a nature reserve called Bukit Timah where monkeys still roam freely (although they also pester you near the entrance of the park).

From Singapore we made a 6 day trip to Bangkok, which official name in Thai is "กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลก ภพนพรัตน์ ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์ มหาสถาน อมรพิมาน อวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะ วิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์". Bangkok is a whole different world compared to Singapore. Where Singapore is clean and modern, Bangkok is large and polluted and has a horrible traffic problem. The main attraction (atleast for me) is all the different temples (wat in Thai). As I like photography, all those temples are a nice subject to take shots of. At your left you find the 46 meter long reclining buddha at Wat Pho. Above is one of the decorations around the building housing the emerald buddha at Wat Phra Kaew. This temple lies on the Grand Palace premises, which houses a lot of other templates and the some buildings used for royalty. We visited the day before the King's birthday which unfortunately meant that some of the buildings were closed. Our hotel was close to Khaosan Road, which is a very vibrant area with lots of food stands and shops that sell fake stuff :). One temple that has quite a different style compared to the others is Wat Arun which you see here on the left. It's in Khmer style and covered with porcelain.

After 6 days we left Bangkok and prepared for our next trip. The next trip went to Bintan, an Indonesian island about an hour by ferry from Singapore. As Dutchie I needed to get a visa for Indonesia so we had to spend some annoying time at the Indonesian embassy in Singapore. We managed to retrieve our passport with the visa just in time before going to Thailand so we were all set to go.

Bintan is a small island and mostly leased by Singapore to put resorts on. We did not go to the North Western resort area but instead we went to Trikora Beach on the east side. We stayed at the Shady Shack which is definitely not a luxurious place. It did have running water (from a large tank) and electricity but that was about it. The main attraction was the nice beach on which our shacks were located. We were the only tourists there and it was very nice and quiet to relax on for a whole day. On the second day of our stay we walked to a nearby fishing village that was built on poles in the ocean. During the night the villagers go out fishing with their kelang (houses on floats) and during they day they would sell their fish in the village. Bintan gave me a small tan and I relaxed quite nicely. In the afternoon of the second day we went back to Singapore where I concluded my holiday.

For all the other pictures that I made during the trip see my gallery.

Yes, christmas time finally gives me some time to write things in my blog again. In the past month I've been two weeks on holiday in Asia (more about that later) and another two long weeks on the eZ components (more about that in a bit too). In the next few days I'll publish my photos and experience of Asia and will start on the fourth installment of the PHP Look Back. Stay tuned!

Last week I've updated some eZ publish extensions to make them work with PHP 4.4. One of them was the enhancedselection datatype.