Shield was started over Christmas break last year, IIRC. I guess it is only fitting that I spent this break working on it some more. Well, I mostly tried to relax and enjoy family time (and too much time playing games). But I also managed to take a couple of nights and knock out one of the frequent questions we've gotten about Shield as developers like yourself start digging into it:

"What does this active field actually do?"

The unfortunate response was, "Not a whole lot".

That's about to be fixed, though. I just submitted a pull request that adds a new Activatable trait to the User which provides 4 new methods:

• isActivated
• isNotActivated
• activate
• deactivate

These are then used by the SessionAuth and TokenAuth filters to restrict inactive users (when the EmailActivator - or custom Activator class - is set as an action after registration). The SessionAuth filter redirects to login route if the user isn't active, while the TokenAuth filter returns a 403 - Forbidden response.

Hopefully this will get approved and included in the next week or so.

I just wanted to keep you guys up to date with what I've been working on. I would love to see a final 1.0 release of Shield before too long. There's a couple of outstanding items that need addressed before that happens, though. I'm going to try and put a little time each week into getting us over the line, but me primary goal in what little free time I have is to try and get the new blog up and running in the next month or so.

I plan on getting the next Vlog episode out by the end of the week.

Then on to working on the importers to get the existing blog posts from both the Wordpress site and here at Patreon in working order. That should be a bit of challenge to get that working well, but that's why we're developers, right? :)

Finally, I'll have to get the Patreon API integrated so I can allow you all to log in and view the restricted content.

Once the blog is functional and the content is updated I'll replace the existing blog. From there, it will be on to the exciting work out building out the course area and the courses. That's the stuff I've been looking forward to with all of this. Can't wait to get there.

Do you guys have any personal projects that you're working on? I'd love to hear a little about them.