So, after all the great work that I did on the site during the first three days and a half days of coding, it’s now four days later and and I’ve had nothing but trouble. It has been so much hassle in fact that I almost gave up on CakePHP and considered changing to CodeIgniter! (But didn’t.)

I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I was having some issues with both the wonderful forum that I was raving about three weeks ago, and a star-rating system that I wanted to add to the site. In the case of the former, the latest edition of the plugin has some bugs which prevent access to the administration system (and the author is currently very busy with other projects, but hopefully an update will be released soon), and in the case of the latter, I was missing some user session data that I had no idea how to add.

So this morning I decided to take a different approach. I’ve started a blank new Cake project – this time located on the web server (not that you’ll be able to access it currently) rather than on my development server – and decided to tackle the user login system first.

At first I was only looking for something simple to let users login if they want to add chapters/stories/comments/etc, and have an additional check for people trying to access the administration section of the site. But then I found Authake, a “user management, authentication and ACL for CakePHP”. Basically this should provide me with all the tools I need to get people signed up to the site, logged in, etc.. and allow me lots of control over which members can do what.

But the best part about it is the fact that it works!

The problem with Authake is that it hasn’t been updated since early 2008, not that this is a problem in itself, but the fact that Cake HAS updated since then could cause some problems – but until that happens – I’m happy with the situation as it stands at the moment.

Tomorrow I’m going to start working on porting the code from the development server onto the web server, and hopefully let a few people have access to the site to start testing it… Watch this space!

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