Beyond more electoral fun and last minute changes (thankfully not impacting on me) I spent some more time on my SSO system working out the database structure for a few tables, extending the installer XML file for my SSO plugins so that they can have some extra information such as their supported states, operations and the key field for a given plugin. I’m using a similar technique that I have used in Joomla! 1.6 by parsing the XML file once, creating the data array and storing it serialized in the table. This way the XML file is only parses once and the much faster PHP unserialize function is used later. This also means that the XML file need not be consulted and the data can be extracted in one query so no excessive increase in over head in the database layer (the query is run anyway, just adding another field) for attempting to open, read and parse the XML file – huge saving. I’ve also managed to get my views down to something logical looking and now that my table structure is finalised I’m getting some work done on the model as well. With any luck I’ll get a mostly working admin component out tomorrow and hopefully finalize the new infrastructure next week. The weekend will be a bit of a wipe out with election being run and potentially me being there to help out.