Hi,
As I've understood in Rails 2.0 it is easy to separate application functionality for different roles. Like for admins:
map.namespace(:admin) do |admin| admin.resources :products, :collection => { :inventory => :get }, :member => { :duplicate => :post }, :has_many => [ :tags, :images, :variants ] end
But then there is also some other ways where user roles are checked in the controllers for example to give, or not, access to some parts of the application.
Namespaced controllers and role based access control (RBAC) are two different things.
Using a namespaced admin controller is useful for displaying different views to admin and regular users. Using RBAC alone, you can limit who has access to certain areas of the site, and you can potentially create different interfaces for admin and regular users, but then they'll be using the same view template, which will be littered with conditionals such as :
<% admin_content do %> <%= link_to('Delete user', ...) %> <% end %>
and your controllers will need to return different results depending upon the role of the currently logged in user, such as:
orders_controller.rb
def index if @user.is_admin? @orders = Order.find(:all, ...) else @order = @user.orders end end
I much prefer to use namespaced controllers which will then give me:
app/views/orders # public views app/views/admin/orders # admin only views
app/controllers/orders_controller.rb # public controller methods app/controllers/admin/orders_controller.rb # for admins only
This also leads to a clear distinction between admin areas and public areas, which should help reduce the possibility of making a mistake in regards to who has access to what.
And to install the restful_acl plugin, just check it out using svn into your vendors directory:
svn co http://restful-acl.googlecode.com/svn/tags/restful_acl
or use piston and import it
Mike
In a current project, I have admins, moderators and users. I use only a single namespace for admins and then I give moderators access to certain parts of the admin interface using RBAC, and allow them to modify portions of the site using conditional blocks with RBAC. I could've created another moderators namespace, but I didn't feel there were enough differences between moderator and admin access to warrant an entirely new set of views and controllers. For example, both admins and moderators can view a list of users (which will be implemented in the admin/users/index action) but only admins can delete users.
I'd be interested to hear how others have implemented this.. Did they use more namespaces, or a combination? I think a namespaced controller is good when there's a very clear distinction between the different levels of access, such as between an admin and a regular user, since the views and requirements of each will be quite different. For the other roles, it's less clear, and this is where it's probably good to use a combination approach.
Mike
This url is confirmed as working. What do you feel is missing from the
documentation? I would be more than happy to update it if I've missed
something useful 
I just recently tried to move my admin stuff into a namespace. It seemed like a really good way to go, but I think I am missing something in two areas.
1. I had problems with the nested access with the tests, and found myself having to redefine paths and locations, without ever quite getting them to run.
2. I cannot figure out where the model sits. By creating nested scaffold resources, the model file was also nested under admin. This was ok for say managing users as a namespaced resource, but I also want to be able to access the users in the normal project namespace.
Just cant quite get my head around it.
Tonypm
the namespace is just for your controllers, your models should still be accessed under one namespace. I've used a two level namespace for models in the past, but gave up on it after I'd heard that it causes more problems than it solves.
Mike
We like to have landing pages for our Admin areas... can I still achieve these with this type of namespaced resources admin area?