Since nobody has commented yet, I'll try to point out a few more of the advantages.
- Make a connection file that will dynamically determine the domain it's on and use the appropriate credentials based on that domain.
Currently a lot of people have a separate local and live database that have different connection information. The only way to handle this now is to maintain separate versions of the connection file. Then you have to make sure not to upload dependent files because it would overwrite the local or live version and break your site. With this new extension you can set up both versions in the connection file itself and not worry about this problem any more.
- Make a connection file to allow changing of the credentials even on the same domain.
Since you can have truly dynamic connection information you can for instance have multiple powerstore sites running with a single admin and allow someone to choose the store they want to administer from the admin and have it switch databases so that one admin could control any number of stores. Also you could use this for things like localization of different languages. For instance in powerCMS you could create a copy of your database for each language and have a dropdown to change the connection to the corresponding language which actually switches the database. Then you can have english, french, spanish, or whatever other language versions of your site all controlled by a session variable that changes the connection and the rest of your site can be the same.
- Make a connection file where just the username and password are dynamic so that different users can have different permissions.
More and more our extensions are going to start creating and manipulating database tables for you. This means your connection in Dreamweaver needs to have privilages that allow that, but you may not want your website user to have the same permissions for security reasons. This allows you to use one connection in DW but a separate connection on your live site to prevent any security concerns around having a user with database table editing privilages... also you may have a site where users view data and administrators insert and update data. You can use different database usernames and passwords associated with the user group by managing session variables to prevent users from having anything but read access to the database. That way even if you hapen to miss a SQL injection hole no malicious destruction or manipulation of data would be possible since the user permissions would prevent those types of queries from running, even though an admin that logs in could still have permission to make those edits.
Make sense? There are probably other good uses of this extension I haven't thought of as well. Please provide some feedback about whether this extension is helpful for you and how you would use it.
