Pubcookie, LDAP and Drupal

Checked in the new version of the pubcookie module, which now has configurable support for LDAP. I also added LDAP-to-profile mapping. When a new user logs in with pubcookie, the LDAP query can populate the user's profile if you've made profile field names match your directory server's field names. That's the Way it Should Be. Single-sign on with zero manual data entry.

All right, I'll be honest...it's not really the Way it Should Be, because Mary is going to get married and change her name, and her Drupal site profile is not going to update automatically. But at least she can edit her profile. (Chances are her LDAP entry isn't updated yet, anyway.)

Vancouver

I've updated the information on the actions/workflow session at the upcoming Drupal Conference in Vancouver.

Drupal has a bright future. Recently merlinofchaos added CCK support to the views module. That means you can now create arbitrary content types and view them in predefined ways that, thanks to sortable tables and the pager, are still interactive. At the CCK design meetings in Antwerp, we had planned CCK views to be deferred until after CCK's adoption. Wow -- it's already here.

Pubcookie module

Finished the pubcookie module for Drupal today. (Hmm, project module's url aliasing for projects seems to be broken on drupal.org. I'd expect it to be at drupal.org/project/pubcookie.) I began adding support for LDAP population of new users, but decided to check it in before feature creep set in too much.

I learn something new from sepeck almost every day. Click the track tab on that page to see how prolific he is. Today I learned the proper place for module documentation.

Pubcoookie

Spent a good part of the day writing a module to enable pubcookie-based authentication in Drupal. Unfortunately pubcookie works a little differently than Drupal's built-in distributed authentication expects, as the username and password are not entered into Drupal's login form but on a separate, secure server.

user.module is a little hairy. I should clarify; I spent little time writing the module (that's easy) and more time tracing paths of execution for authentication.

Book plan

I've decided to start working on a manuscript for a book on developing with Drupal.

Drupal has seen explosive growth in the last year and a book presenting Drupal's core concepts and approaches to common problems will help a new wave of developers to get up to speed quickly.

I am aiming for coverage of Drupal 4.7. (Update: probably 5.0 too.)