Now onto the tutorial, if you could call it that.
This is useful for when you have a user access restriction to certain pages, and you dont want to use numbers, which at some point, might get a lil confusing. You may start to wonder if, 1 = admin or 5 = guest. Or the other way around.
You might start to clutter up with something like this.For Example.
$USER_LOGGED_IN means nothing, in this tutorial.But it can be interpreted as a replacement for the user's name/id that is logged in at the moment from a COOKIE/SESSION that is initialized by the user.
if(UserAuthentication($USER_LOGGED_IN, 0)){ // Zero (0) Being the access needed echo("Welcome Member"); }
With this example, you can define the variable so that it can be identified easily.For Example it could be done like this.
if(UserAuthentication($USER_LOGGED_IN, $user_access['member'])){ // $user_access["name"] Being the access needed echo("Welcome Member"); }But that still wouldnt look nice.
But with this code below...
<?php $USER_ACCESS = array(); // Create User Access Array // Create Access List Array $access_levels = array("0" => "Guest", "1" => "Member", "2" => "Special Member", "3" => "Global Moderator", "4" => "Administrator"); // Insert Access List into the User Access Array // Create User Access Array $USER_ACCESS = array_flip($access_levels); /*This is Another Way to Define The Access Array foreach($access_levels as $key => $value){ $USER_ACCESS[$value] = $key; } //*/ // Start Defining the access. To create a new variable. EG: SPECIAL_MEMBER foreach($USER_ACCESS as $key => $value){ $DEFINE_KEY = str_replace(" ","_", strtoupper($key)); $DEFINE_VALUE = $value; define($DEFINE_KEY,$DEFINE_VALUE); } ?>
You could do something like this;
if(UserAuthentication($USER_LOGGED_IN, GUEST)){ echo("This page can be publicly viewed."); }It wouldnt take much modifying to turn the hard-coded "$access_levels" array list into something taken from a database.
Sorry if its not really sounding like a tutorial, but...
1) Im tired
2) I dont usually write the tutorials, but the code for the tutorials.
Gimme pointers on makin this sound more tutorialish.
Hope this helps someone
Edited by PlaGuEX, 21 December 2006 - 09:16 PM.