The current access control mechanism uses an incomplete, abstracted
implementation of phpGACL. There are eleven user groups; these groups are
sometimes referred to as usertypes. Joomla! also maintains a set of three legacy
access groups, Public, Registered, and Special.
The legacy groups are stored in the #__groups table; theoretically this makes the
legacy access groups dynamic. There is no mechanism for administrators to amend
the legacy access groups and even if we manually add a new legacy access group
to the #__groups table, the effects are not globally reflected; we should regard the
legacy access groups as static. It is advisable not to make extensions dependent on
the legacy access groups because they will probably be removed from Joomla! at a
later date.
We should be most interested in the phpGACL groups (simply called groups or
user groups). Currently no mechanism is provided for administrators to amend
these groups, we can, however, take advantage of the powerful JAuthorization
Error Handling and Security
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class that extends the gacl_api class.
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