CakePHP Questions

Hello all,

I'm currently about to create a new website for an internet community whose current web is just like a mish-mash of like about 5-10 years old ugly Microsoft aspx scripts. However, we use to have around 40 different staff positions as our community is quite huge (> 100K registrations, whereof ~10K are active members).

They care about various things, so, to come back to my origin inquery: Each staff position comes with its own permissions, thats normal. Anyway, I have read both 'Web development with CakePHP' (german book by O'Reilly) and the CakeBook and so I have read about ACL and the like, which are - as far is I have understood - limited to control the access to different actions/methods.

However, how - in real general - is it possible to have a more detailled user permission control, so lets say to implement this example:

Database column x may only be edited from people in user group X. When there is a modification form of a database entry in question - this field will be read-only or even hidden if that entry should not be visible/editable for the user currently logged in.

The modification form itself however is just a view of e.g. the “edit” action of the Member-Controller (/members/edit/1), so what I basically need it so have a user control somehow within the view but not by leaving the MVC-pattern.

I hope I expressed clearly.

Thanks for your support! I really fell in admiration for CakePHP, so I guess its a good thing to optimise my PHP code and abilites (I've not worked with frameworks before..).