The Overclocked Too many questions, all the right answers.

Well it has been quite a bit of time since I have made a blog post, so I think it would be a good idea to make one today! One thing I want to set straight though, just because I haven't made any recent blog posts does NOT mean I have not been working on Drupaltin!

In the past few posts you have read about the Drupal module side of Drupaltin. Well the good news is that the module is pretty much done (the essential framework + a few extras) and I have now began development on the vBulletin plugin side of Drupaltin. First and foremost in my journey of the plugin is to get the login code done. The login code of course is the synchronous login. It is already done for when you login through Drupal (and works great I must say!!!) so now I just need to do the opposite for the vBulletin login.

In the alpha release I used a rather strange method of authenticating into Drupal from vBulletin, a method which I decided early on to abandon. Since Drupal uses a PHP session to handle user authentication, the alpha Drupaltin would bootstrap Drupal and start a session for the user automatically. While this seems like a good method, and it is in some ways, it is far more resource intensive then it needs to be and there are some session conflicts which I would rather not see.

There was some discussion in the Drupaltin 5.x-1.0a Bugs thread about how sometimes the PHP session ends prematurely and the user would be signed out of Drupal but still be signed in vBulletin. A fellow Drupaltin user, Keyz, mentioned that he uses the Drupal module "Persistent Login" to work around this issue. I did some quick research on the module and had my mind made up, I would use it for the next Drupaltin release.

The Persistent Login module will have an intricate part in Drupaltin starting with the next release. Back to the vBulletin login plugin, to authenticate a user from vBulletin Drupaltin will only bootstrap the Drupal database (much less resources compared to a full bootstrap), write a single query to the persistent_login table, set the appropriate cookie, and bam the user will now be perma-logged into Drupal as well as vBulletin.

Of course I could even cut the Persistent Login module down a bit and not require the database query, but after doing some reading about the security behind the method I think it is well worth the minuscule amount of extra resources required. Remember that the extra resources will only be used when a user is logging in, not often are there going to be more then a few people logging in at the same time even on the largest of sites.

That is a nice little peak into what is to come, oh but so much more is on the drawing board!