A better approach to security

[Duane <duane AT cacert.org>]

Currently I've been playing with smarty/pear for work related reasons 
and it seems like a pretty good idea to start using these modules with 
any code CAcert uses, PEAR seems well tested and it does a lot of 
sanatising on the data before handing it from the end user to the 
scripts, and smarty is a template system designed to separate the code 
from the presentation side of things. So graphic designers don't need to 
know a single line of code and should be able to make things as pretty 
as they like.

Some of the PEAR modules separates the code from the database, so if 
things get changed from MySQL to PGSQL to Oracle to whatever PHP 
supports no code would ever have to be changed again as long as no 
database specific queries were built.

For those of you with no idea what I'm talking about...
http://smarty.php.net and http://pear.php.net

Both of which require a slight learning curve, but for those familiar 
with PHP it only took me about a day or so to get the gist of it and 
have a few pages on http://funny.evilbunny.org converted to use that 
instead of hard coding the html in with the php code, made it a lot more 
readable as well.

PEAR has a number of other modules such as quick forms and 
authentication which can even do password quality checking apparently, 
so far I haven't been able to play with it, but am trying to get round 
to it.

--

Best regards,
 Duane

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