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.

tags: web site identity saml oauth rest