Monthly Archives: August 2010

Simpler role-based access control for CakePHP

2010/08/28 – 21:02

It’s been a rough ride but I think I’m finally getting the hang of CakePHP‘s AclComponent. The official documentation kind of sucks, unless you’re a Lord of the Rings fan. Great, but how do I apply this in a real world application. I needed full role-based access control in a -application I’m working on. In the end [...]

Not so poor man’s cron jobs for CakePHP

2010/08/20 – 00:22

A.k.a. “How to make AuthComponent think the user is someone else” The other day I needed to add subscribable email reports to a CakePHP web application. The system should generate the reports automatically every few days and send them automatically to their owners. In a Unix setting that would be job for cron. Unfortunately my hosting, while [...]

Fixing mangled characters in MySQL

2010/08/09 – 19:26

Some 30000 UTF-8 encoded posts in a popular Spanish forum had been stored in a column defined as latin1 with the usual consequences: accented characters like á é ó ñ got mangled into á é ó ñ, also known as mojibake. To complicate matters more, the more recent content was properly encoded in latin1, so a [...]