When all the traditional features of the blog are set in place, your blog will become a part of the blogging community. As a blogger, you will come to understand by putting into practice some of the most integral features of the blogging toolbox. Understanding the following terms will help you to use them with confidence when communicating with other bloggers and establishing a reputable online presence.

Blogosphere

When you post content to a blog, you become part of the vast, virtual conversations talking place between bloggers, readers, subscribers and commenters. The blogosphere refers to this virtual network of blogs you participate in as a blogger.

Trackback

A “passive” or distance commenting in which a blogger references another blogger’s post via the individual post’s Permalink or Trackback link on their blog.

Pingback

A pingback is a signal that typically notifies blog directories whenever you have updated your blog. There is a section under Options in WordPress where you can also configure it to automatically ping a list of blog directories.

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While there are plenty of tutorials out there covering how to use CakePHP’s ACL Component, and getting it to jive with CakePHP’s Auth Component, most of the tutorials out there take different approaches towards implementing this technology. If this is your first time using ACL, you might be feeling a little confused about exactly how ACL works, and if you’re like me, diving through all of these conflicting tutorials (some which use deprecated functions based on prior versions of cake) only serves to further confuse.

So now that I’ve spent a good couple of days wrapping my head around this concept, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned with you, so hopefully you can get this up and running much quicker than I did. To do this you’re going to need to understand some basic concepts of ACL, reading up on this in depth will only help you. I’ll try and point out some of the major pitfalls I ran into, so you don’t make the same mistakes. I’m not going to give you code, since this will just further confuse you. You’re going to have to write a fair bit of code on your own to get this working for your application. But I will provide a link to my source code for my project and an sql dump of my ARO tables so you can see what they should look like at the end of the tutorial.

Step One, What You Need to Learn

ACL basically defines what actions each person or group (AROs) can do to each item (ACOs). The important thing to remember is that an ARO and an ACO are really exactly the same. In a web application, everything is a row in a table. Each user or group or post or comment is just a row in the User, Group, Post or Comment table. So what we are doing is saying, when someone is logged in as a certain row in the User table, which rows in the Post table are they able to access? Groups are used so that users can inherit permissions. This saves us effort and results in fewer rows in our ACL tables because we don’t have to redefine permissions for each user, they simply inherit the permissions of the group they are in. A user can have a combination of any of the following permissions on an item: create, read, update and delete.

Setup the ACL tables by following the ACL section of the CakePHP manual. Once you have it setup, open up phpmyadmin or cocoa and have a look at the tables that were created, they should be acos, aros, and aros_acos. Lets look at the fields in these tables to understand what is going on. If it helps, whenever you see ARO think User, and whenever you see ACO think Post.

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This is the first blog post in a series of six or seven that will look at practical tips for writing a successful blog, using WordPress. These posts are designed to get you started on the right foot with an introduction to common blogging lingo, writing tips and information on how to market your blog.

While blogs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, there are common features to all that define the blog as a communication medium. These features enable larger virtual conversations to take place between bloggers, readers and subscribers.

Content

“Content is king,” an often repeated adage in the blogosphere, speaks to arguably the most important component of your blog. In the form of individual articles, entries, or posts, the main content of the blog is arranged in reverse chronological order with the newest entry closest to the top and identified by date, time, and author.

Post Title (Headline)

Identifying the content and/or themes of an individual blog post, titles act as an important indicator for blog readers and subscribers. Quality titles grab reader’s attention and include relevant keywords that can lead to better improved search engine rankings, increased linking by readers and distribution in popular social networks such as Digg and del.icio.us.

Here’s a few articles that should help you optimize your blog titles:

• Blog Marketing Tips #1: How to Optimize Blog Post Titles
• How to Craft Post Titles that Draw Readers Into Your Blog
• Headsmacking Tip #3: Run Your Blog Post Titles Through Keyword Research Before You Hit Publish

Comments

In a section following each post, readers can write responses and share feedback. Depending on the information shared by the commenter, each comment can have a name, web site, date and time associated with it. The names of readers will be hyperlinked if they have their own web site. This section can also contain Trackbacks and Pingbacks.

Archives

Each post is stored and cataloged by date in a searchable blog history, or archive. The archive is usually visible on the sidebar, though it may be contained within a separate page.

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