In a new post to his blog today Chris Hartjes looks at some of his thought process when implementing authentication and access control in his Zend Framework applications.

One of the more frustrating things about using Zend Framework is that for pretty much any topic, there is always at least 2 ways to accomplish a particular task. For a beginner with the framework, this is a humungous barrier to overcome. When I try to implement something, my first question is no longer "how will I do this" but "where the hell should I put this code?". In my case, the problem I was attempting to solve was "how do I implement ACL for one module in my application?"

He found examples using plugins, pieces in the front controller, putting code in preDispatch but they didn't fit his situation. Instead he used these examples to create his solution. The code for this is included in the post along with a unit test (PHPUnit) to help ensure everything's working.