I am planning to build a site which will have members and member uploaded content. I need to choose between the following:
a) A separate interface for admins and users
b) Same interface for admins and users
For example, a particular module 'yellowpages', would have listings uploaded by members. When the owner of the listing visits the page, they will be displayed edit/delete links by checking their session data against the database. The same will be displayed to an administrator. These links will not be visible to public users. The edit/delete functions will also check if the user is the owner/or is an admin so as to avoid the public from accessing the edit/delete URLs direclty.
Also, if the user is an admin, an additional navigation bar will be displayed on the top which has links to functions that will add/edit/modify site settings and everything.
So my question is, is the above a good way to do it? or to have separate interfaces for users and admins like http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2009/07/Create-an-Admin-panel-with-CodeIgniter
There is another options too. And I Prefer this.
C) Mix Both (a) and (b) Options of Yours
Create a separate interface for admins.
which includes admin listing and managing of users and listings (edit/delete/ban user etc..)
Plus You can use users and permissions type of situation.
For Ex.
Add a table permissions user type can be admin, guest, registered,
moderator etc..
Depend on login type : session will be stored and as
per session in front end the operations will be displayed.
Ex.:
guest will not see "add comment" link ;
registered can add comment +
listings + edit own listing ;
moderator can edit anyone's listing ;
admin has all rights.
Depend on your application and time you can add as much as you want.
I wrote as per globalization of any application.
If you gona use same interface it whould be less secure. Intruder would be theoretically able to become admin throug user interface. Also while programming you will have to keep in mind that some methods would be used by user and admin both - so ypu can simply forget something letting intruder some way to go. I'd beter create one class with methods used by admin and user (i.e. edit(), delete()) and extend it with two classes - user and admin.
Related
At this time, I have a simple admin login section to my web site, from which an admin could add/edit page content add/edit pages or subjects.
Now, I am thinking down the line in this project for this site to work in the way needed. I need to add multi level users system,
I would think that adding a user level as an INT to my table sets would allow this,
then in my pages where I have my "is_logged_in" function call I could also call the user level INT and store it in the session.
This way if the user is set to level 1 show links a,
if the user is set to level 2 show the links b.
or am I looking at this the wrong way?
No need to reinvent the wheel. What you're looking for is called Access Control List (ACL) functionality. There are lots of available solutions you can incorporate into your project. Personally I use Zend's Acl libraries but there are many more flavors out there.
How it works (basic version): you assign some ACL roles - e.g. "admin", "staff", "user", "guest" where "guest" would be your default anonymous visitor. When a user logs in, you save the ACL role in the user's session.
You then create an ACL class that assigns these roles to your resources. E.g. "admin" can read and edit anyone's data, "staff" can read "admin", "staff" and "user" data, but only edit its own and "user" data, "user" can read other "user" data but only edit its own data.
At any point in your application where you need to check if a user is allowed to perform some action or access certain sections of a website (e.g. the CMS), you check against your ACL rules to execute the action / allow access or tell the user he/she is not authorized.
My tool uses:
PHP for scripting.
mySQL for DB.
Apache for host.
There will be 2 groups of users.
I want to give access to 1 group of users only for 2 webpages.
The other group of users will have the access for all the pages and links.
Is there a way I can hide certain links on a webpage from a certain group of users, too.
How can I achieve this.
Fairly new to programming.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Lets say, Admin & normal user.... in that case we will have a column in the user table which will store he/she is admin or not. When you do authentication, fetch this value & keep it in SESSION. So in every page you check this person is admin or not with that session value using if clause.
It's hard to give any fitting exmaples without code, but if you have a MySQL and know some PHP, the basic way of solving this problem would be connecting to the database, checking what group the currently logged in user is (check by ID or however you set things up) and wrapping if statements around the links you want to hide from certain people that check if they belong to the right group to see said pages. You can also hide the pages from them by just putting a check whether they can see the page content or not on top of the content and throwing some sort of no permission error when needed. For this basic example hard-coding the groups into the files should be sufficient. If you plan on expanding all this later on, I'd maybe make a seperate table in your database controlling page view permissions.
You can also include HTML code in your PHP if statements by just closing the PHP section after the if (?>) and put the closing bracket of the if at the end of your HTML menu for the secret group (<?php } ?>).
If you provide us with some code snippets, we can maybe help you a bit more with examples.
There are many ways you could achieve this.
How to 'hide' the page
A good way to really hide the pages would be to check the type of user before displaying anything. If the type of user has access to the requested page, display it. If the user does not have access, you could send a 404 page not found error.
This way, user which does not have access to the page wont even know the page exist even if they have the URL.
Authenticate the user
As mentioned by Akhil Sidharth, you can use a $_SESSION variable to keep the type of the user trying to view the pages.
Every application now a days is using group, permission and capabilities to restrict site/application users from accessing the page/content/link within the site/application. Sometime group might be refereed as role to organize users. Let me describe -
Group/Role - Role might be - Admin, Manager, Employee, Customer etc. Your application should have role management system where you can manage(add/edit/delete) the roles/user-groups. These roles should be stored in DB tables.
Permission - Permission might be Allow, Deny, Restrict etc.
Capabilities - Capabilities might define the list of works/actions/activities that a user can take on your site or on a particular page. Some examples are - a. Can View XY*Z link b. Can View X*B page c. Can create user d. Can assign permission e. Can change permission etc.
Apart from this, your application should have two addtional management page -:
Configure capabilities & permission for the said roles, where you can configure and set capabilities either 'Allow'/'Deny' for the roles.
Role to users - This is the page where you can put the users into a particular role.
In this way you have the idea, what a particular users have rights/permissions to do on the site & restrict the users over accessing the contents/pages/links accordingly.
Alternatively, the simplest way for you now is to add a 'type' field in your user DB table. Add a drop down of users types where you are creating/updating the user & save the user type in your user db table. Restrict the user on the basis of user type accordingly.
HI,
i am writing and designing a website with php.in this site every want can register and admin can go to admin.php for manage the site.but my problem is that every one that type www.example/login/admin.php can access to admin.php.how can i prevent other users that can't access to admin page?
You probably want to look at .htaccess file. Check this link out
You have to do the login page for the admin.php. Only if the people with the correct username and password can see the admin page and do the admin action
How do you define terms like "user" and "admin" and what is the process for creating/registering an account?
Generally, you would associate "users" with "roles" in your database. If a user account is supposed to be an admin, you associate that user record with the admin role. If the user is a standard user, associate them with the standard user role (which may be the default by having no role, though I'm not a big fan of implicit knowledge vs. explicit definitions in software). Users should also be able to have multiple roles, in case you have various classes of "user" and they need to have overlapping privileges.
Then, in the admin section of the site, your code would check if the current logged-in user (however you track that, you didn't specify) is in a given role before rendering the page. If not, then either send the user to another page or display a message, etc.
If every user can access the admin page, then essentially every user is an admin. How do you distinguish one from another in the code or in the data? That's where you need to start.
My RealEstate PHP Application have following user groups,
Admins,
Moderators
Agents
i want to specify following permission to the following users.
Admins - >
Can Create Moderators,
Can Create Agents,
Can Insert Properties,
Can Update Properties,
Can Delete Properties
Hence an Admin will have all the privileges in short an Admin here will be superAdmin
I want to assign limited privileges to the moderator and hence to the agents.
i am confused on how to Create a Database for this and also on how to implement it in my PHP Application.
thank you
It sounds like you are going to need a role-based access control system. Developing one is not
really a trivial task, so as already suggested, finding a framework or ready-made class that does
the job would be a worth while start.
Role Based Access Control
http://www.tonymarston.net/php-mysql/role-based-access-control.html
http://www.sqlrecipes.com/database_design/fine_grained_role_based_access_control_rbac_system-3/
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=162027
You should create a table wher you have to define all type of role.
and one table for users
relate different roles to different user Via linking two tables.
and some thing like this ......
The way that I have done this in the past was to create a users table in the database that had an access level (Admin, Moderator, and agents).
Then if you have a menu system, implement a check to see what privileges are needed for what links... Admins will see all links, Moderator will only see links he/she is supposed to, and agents will only see what they are supposed to see.
Also on the pages that you may want to restrict users you will want to check for the users access level. If they pass, they will see the page, if not, they will be redirected or a javascript error will need to pop up.
Something like the access level may do you some good to store it in a cookie as you can cut down your calls to your database.
Hope this helps,
Mike
I am creating an web application and I at the point that i am starting to make backend choices. Now there are a lot of ways to go with this, so I am looking for some good points and back practices.
Some of the question i have involve:
Should i make a seperate table in the db for admin users
Should i extend make some classes to load the admin data and the normal data, or make seperate classes for the admin section
Where can i get some information on making different types of users
Just some best practices for a backend
My application is written in PHP with an MySQL database.
Keeping a separate table for admin users is nice, but only if those admin users aren't "regular" users as well - otherwise you'll step on your own toes trying to keep usernames/IDs unique but somewhat connected.
A couple things to consider:
Apache authentication (or Windows accounts on IIS) for admin users. Separate system entirely, but allows for overlap - a regular user can be a regular user, but they can't access any admin functionality until they authenticate through the browser. Works fine if you only have a couple specific kinds of user role (e.g. member & administrator only).
All users in one table, but with roles and permissions separate. This is the most flexible because you can get as granular as you need. For example, any user can "post comments," while an admin can "delete comments" and "ban users," but a moderator can only "suspend comments" and "mute users." As you add new features, it's simply a matter of implementing some new permissions & assigning them to the roles. Drupal's access control does this really well, worth a close look.
A good way to do it is to add a new field in the users table for 'rank' in order to differentiate between regular users and staff members, and possibly between the different staff member levels such as moderator, admin, etc. if you need it. Because an administrator should be able to perform all functions that a user can. Use
class Admin extends User { }
if you want to add additional functionality specific to staff members.
As for backend functions, that depends on how your site is set up. If you're using a framework, you can just add new functions to existing controllers and restrict access only to users with a certain rank.
For example, you might have a controller for ForumPost objects, but calling the ForumPost delete() function would require the user to be a forum moderator.
If you're not using a framework, you'll probably have to make your own pages for each backend function you need.