I have been developing a new intranet site based on Drupal 6 for the past two months. I decided I would write a series of post explaining the setup, since Drupal is such a widely used CMS used by large to small websites all over the web.

Server Setup

The development setup:

Drupal 6.2
MYSQL 5 and PHP 5
Mac OS X Server 10.5.2
Quad 2 GHZ PowerMac G5 with 2.5 GB of memory

Authentication

Drupal by default has its own built in authentication system that consists of users, roles and permissions. Users are placed into roles, which are similar to groups in any other directory system. Permissions allow you to limit or grant access to items by role. If developing a public website or blog the standard authentication is great, but for the use as an Intranet, it needed more. I decided to tie the authentication into our Active Directory system using a LDAP authentication module which also allows to use AD groups as roles.

Once I figured out the correct port numbers and misc. settings to get an LDAP module to work with AD, it worked like a charm.

To come – Part 2: Modules

-bproctor