redesigning lclark.edu

integration

Rails IS the portal platform

I was researching ways to solve the newest, latest technical problem:  With any of these cool Rails applications we have, or are considering making, how do we do something like add a forum or a blog?

Usually, one might integrate these into an existing web app by installing onto the same webserver something like Wordpress,  doctoring up its theme to look like the original app, and then… the real work begins. :-(  For example, sessions are probably handled entirely differently, and Wordpress has a particular and heavy conception of what a user is.  Even though Wordpress is open and easy to work with, there’s probably little chance of a 100% seamless, single-sign-on integration.

But in the Rails world, well, Rails is the platform, not the webserver per se.  So I wondered if there was more hope for a solution, and it looks like there is.

First of all, there’s Beast, “a small and light-weight forum in Rails with a scary name and … around 500 lines of code”.  And then, the end of a discussion yielded this great advice:

Single sign on is very easy. All you have to do is set your session domain to be the same by typing (for rails 2.0)

config.action_controller.session = {
   :session_key    => “_session_id”,
   :secret         => “secret_session”,
   :session_domain => “.mydomain.com” }

Makes perfect sense.  And that takes care of the hardest part.  I envision Rails acting like a portal platform: allowing us to add in a third-party blog, forum or other common, modular application.

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