The idea of Horde Policy is to implement a replacement for the current prefs system, modeled after how Group Policy Objects work in a Microsoft Active Directory. Including a nice administrative GUI, meaning no more editing prefs.php files, and happier admins.
policy |-- name |-- date-updated |-- attribute-group | |-- attributes | | |-- attribute1 | | | |-- value | | | `-- scope | | `-- attribute2 | | |-- value | | `-- scope | `-- attribute-group | |-- attribute-group | | `-- attribute1 | | |-- value | | `-- scope | `-- attribute1 | |-- value | `-- scope |-- attribute-group | `-- attribute1 | |-- value | `-- scope `-- targets |-- target1 `-- target2
In order to make Horde Policies as generic as possible, it's probably best to specify a new backend for them. Then we can write policy drivers for the various parts of Horde that might use them, such as Prefs.
I'm a big fan of the Datatree structure, slightly simplified, to hold the Policy information. The DataTree itself has proved not to scale very well, but I think by removing a few unneeded fields (for this application, at least), we can reduce the number of JOIN statements, and it should scale just fine. Another thing to think about is how many Horde Policies is a given site going to have? Probably no more than a handful on average.
Anyway, here's a new table structure idea:
horde_policy ------------ policy_id policy_name policy_updated
horde_policy_attributes ----------------------- policy_id attribute_name attribute_scope attribute_overrideable attribute_value
horde_policy_targets -------------------- policy_id target_id target_type <-- maybe
I'm not exactly sure how to throw the attribute-groups in here yet.
At login, all applicable Policies should be loaded and cached. We should also try to do something to cache Policies for guest sessions.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/msit/security/grppolobjectmgmt.mspx - gives a good overview on how MS GPO's work, and a nice graphic that really helped me visualize the internal workings.
- with something like this in place I think it would make more and
more sense to move everything that's at all user-related in conf.php
files to this system. Things like "user capabilities" in both Horde
and IMP - they can even be locked (overridable = false?) by default,
but letting people easily manage them on a per-group basis, or
whatever, sounds very good to me.
If there were a way to manage, say, IMAP server configs, or other
backend configurations (sieve servers, etc.) using this system, that
would be even better.