Going Drupal

Oh well, I finally sat down and took the time to convert my aging main web site into something more dynamic. Since my – overall – quite reliable hoster gives me free PHP5 and MySQL databases, I took a closer look at Drupal, given its overall support, ease of use and add-on module availability. My first impressions are quite good: it was easy to get up and does not seem to be too hard to administer. Converting my exising HTML went well, although the default editor (or more specifically: the Drupal filters) have a tendency to get in the way at the beginning.

Now, one thing I will probably spend a little time on over the next few weeks (time permitting – haha), is to develop a somewhat more reasonable authentication scheme for my various web properties. I have a happy collection of PHP apps, this .NET based blog, and also some custom Java apps. So far there is really no identity management in place; a fact that has been a sore for a while. A simple SSO authentication scheme across these difference platforms is a panacea, but it should not be to difficult to achieve. I am looking actively into using Oauth or SAML as the token format, and a simple RESTful transport.

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2 thoughts

  1. Did you consider other portal software? I am currently thinking about adding one to a forum site I help maintaining. The forum is based on PHP so Drupal or Joomla seem like the natural choice. I am currently leaning towards Joomla because that particular forum software seems to be better integrated. Drupal is supposed to have merits when it comes to the internal software architecture. But this is PHP after all…

  2. Well, I was looking at Drupal, WordPress, and Mambo, mostly. While WordPress was too limiting, I did not need all the features that Mambo offers, so Drupal was right there in the middle, and I had meddled with it before. From what I know about Joomla, it would probably have worked also… as you said, architecture is probably not the most important decision point when looking at PHP apps.

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