Extending Zend_Acl to support custom roles and resources

Few days ago I played a little with the Zend_Acl package, which provides lightweight and flexible access control list functionality and privileges management. It was very easy to use, but I found that the base Zend_Acl package has some limitation/problem if you want to use it in a bigger real life project. Zend_Acl supports only logical roles, resources so I decided to extend it to allow using custom roles and resources which can represent existing entities (for example users/groups and topics in a database). You will find the full source code and sample sql dump in the end of the post. (more…)