Well, if I get this correctly, then you want to authorize certain authority masks to certain parts of the panel, which is easy.
What my friend and I did, was setup a row in the "user" table, or whatever you use, and use 1-1-1-1-1-
Each "1", represents access to each particular section. Which, you can obvious explode to check and do i++ foreach(){}, blah to ensure the proper authority.
We also stored each CATEGORY in the database. The categories are what the 1's represent. The links to the specific category were stored in another table. Obviously if they don't have access to that CATEGORY, if they try going directly to the link, their access will be denied.
For instance:
1- = Access to the panel
1-1- = User database or something
If it's only 1-, they have access to the panel, but don't have access to view, or access anything else in the panel.
Obviously if the row is NULL, they can't access poop.
That's one way of doing it, which works well for me, anyway.