Lee Blue has posted something looking to bridge yet another gap between Ruby on Rails and PHP - a method for adding before_filter functionality to PHP.

I often use this when implementing a simple login screen for a password protected section of my application. In a Zend Framework application you can implement a preDispatch() function in a Zend_Controller_Action which will run before an action is dispatched. This lets you setup your filter to check to see if the visitor is logged in or not. If the visitor is not logged in, you can redirect them to the login screen of your application.

He includes example code to show its usefulness - checking to see two things: is a user is logged in and to see if they're allowed to use a certain resource.

On PHPGeek.com, there's a new post talking about the use of the AuthComponent for CakePHP for access control in your application. It's not a tutorial, but it does follow how the developer came upon the component and why they're using it.

Nearly everything that is built needs at least some level of authentication and authorization before users can be let loose to use it. Unfortunately, not only is there a lot of confusion out there on how to use it, but lots of poorly done, reinvented wheels out there because of it.

He points out the solution he came across via another article from the "Another Cake Baker" blog (lemoncake) show how to use the component for ACL in CakePHP 1.2.