12/06/08 11:43 / News / Admin Panel stuff

Check the shiz out, this entry is being posted from the admin panel, instead of phpMyAdmin!
I've made some key changes to authentication- there is now a full multi-level user authentication, stored in the database, and with hashed passwords. The hashing was far easier than I thought in the end- previously I'd been using crypt(), but that was flagging different results for each script that ran it, and since iE4 is built up of several eval()'s, it was impossible to get two crypt()'ed variables to match. I've since discovered that md5() is nice and simple. It's not as secure, since it's based on a hash instead of encryption, but I've done some reading up and I'm hoping to get some salt into the system that should make the hashes nasty enough to be secure. Need to check if there's an official way of doing this, or a php function that can do it, failing that, I'll add the salt manually in the script, and that should still have the same effect of messing up the hash beyond rainbow recognition.
So now each module of the admin panel has an access level required to view it, and a level required to change it. Each user can be a Viewer (0) designed to be able to view private data that's hidden from the public part of the website, User (1) who can change their password, and use typical admin modules, such as the blog, Moderator (2), who can create and edit other mods, users, and viewers, as well as changing the minor configuration of the website, and Admins (3), who have full access to everything.
This all fills a big problem that I nearly missed, in that the thought hadn't occurred to me that the target audience of this product is likely to have several people working on it, and having a single admin password isn't too smart.

Next stage is to make a module to manage modules, and I think I'll have a beta version on my hands- certainly I will have removed the requirement for phpMyAdmin, which is a sure sign that the system is nearing basic completion.

18/06/08 18:00 / Blog / Status

One downside of working in a shop is that you always have to be the bearer of bad news. A guy calls and says "My computer's making a strange noise."
He holds the phone near the PC, and I hear the metronome click of a failed hard drive.
It's balanced by the success stories I guess... It's nice when someone is grateful that you've fixed their computer, I had a laptop in this week showing all signs of a dead motherboard, but after a complete strip-down and re-build it looks to be just fine. Amazing how taking things apart and putting them back together still works these days.

The shop's not making big bucks on retail sales unfortunately... this was expected, but we hoped for a little better than this. We're surviving on repair jobs at the moment, we've pretty much got the market to ourselves, apart from a new shop that's opened down the road, but they look very much like cowboys, so we're not feeling threatened.
The Gold Hill Fare is coming up this July though, and we're hoping to set up a really good stall and put on a great publicity stunt.
We're negotiating for power, but so long as we can have a generator, we'll be able to have some demo machines, a big TV showing video and other cool stuff, and maybe a music recording demo. Me and the boss both play guitar, so we could put on a pretty good show of recording in garage band and audacity.

I'm happy with the website progress at the moment too... not much has changed visually, but as I've said in the News Feed, I've made serious progress in the admin panel, which has been a bit of a show stopper up until now.
I've also added a new theme the the website, you can switch to it with the Magic Theme Selector™ at the bottom of the page, or by clicking HERE.
Got my twitter feed going as well. The flash badge I had previously in the toolbars looks naff, but I found their HTML/JS based one allows for a fair amount of hacking up to suit a page, so I managed to get it into an add on bar at the bottom.

Going to add to my profile page as soon as I get round to it, and the about page too, they're still naff.

Magic Theme Selector:

Idle Entity v4 (Default) Idle Entity v4 Green Low Graphics Boundary