Back to Comparison to Sitellite CMS.
In Sitellite, there's a global $session object, and convenience functions to access it such as:
<?php
if (! session_valid ()) {
// not logged in
}
?>
In Elefant, there's a User class that extends the database Model class. You can use it like this:
<?php
if (! User::require_login ()) {
$page->title = i18n_get ('Members');
echo $this->run ('user/login');
return;
}
global $user;
// you can now use $user to access the current user's info
?>
There's also a simpler way to do the above that will redirect them to the user login or admin login forms by simply doing this:
<?php
$this->require_login ();
// you'll be logged in here, Elefant takes care of the redirects
?>
And for admin-only access:
<?php
$this->require_admin ();
// proceed as an admin
?>
Encrypting a password:
<?php
$encrypted = User::encrypt_pass ($password);
?>
There's also a built-in user app with handlers for all the basics (login, logout, signup, view profile, update profile, password recovery, and user management).
The User model contains the following fields:
User logins use the email for username.
Elefant allows arbitrary fields to be associated with users via the userdata field, which is a JSON-encoded associative array. You can access it like this:
<?php
// fetch
echo User::ext ('fieldname');
// update
User::ext ('fieldname', 'new value');
// save changes
User::$user->put ();
?>
The only limitation is that since it's a single field, you will need to implement your own index if you need to index users by one of these fields. This is fairly easy to do with a reverse-lookup database table of the form:
create table user_fieldname(
id integer primary key,
fieldname char(32) not null,
user int not null,
index (fieldname)
);
Then you can easily retrieve all users with a single field value via:
select * from user_fieldname where fieldname = ""value"";
Or if you want the values to be unique to the user, use:
create table user_fieldname(
fieldname char(32) not null,
user int not null,
primary key (fieldname)
);
This type of table can be handy for things like associating unique external identifiers with users in Elefant.