The SitePoint PHP blog has kicked off a new series of posts today with part one of a set of tutorials showing you how to create a registration and invitation system with Symfony2. While they've talked about general Symfony2 development before, this series will focus more on the security side, on authentication and authorization.

In this article series of two parts, we are going to talk about a very important area of web application development: Authentication and Authorization. Symfony2 has a very detailed elaboration of these two topics in its official documentation. Anyone who is seriously looking into this is encouraged to read through that official document after absorbing the essentials from this tutorial.

The author starts with a brief list of common user management tasks including registration via a form, sending confirmation emails and verifying the user's login. He helps you create the underlying "user" table (complete with the SQL) and talks a bit about the contents of a few of the columns. He includes the settings you'll need to put into your "security.yml" configuration file and a bit of detail on what each section and its settings mean. He then moves on to the "User" entity and class file, adding some functionality to the standard generated class. He also includes the code needed to create the invite and registration actions.