PRONOVIX

It's always been possible to use service bridges to delegate tasks between Drupal sites. Recently however a lot of new modules have been implemented for Drupal that are (going to) making this a lot easier. So much easier that I believe that Drupal service clouds, in which features are distributed over more than one specialized site, will become one of the great architecture options (together with organic groups, domain access and installation profile powered multi-site setups) to keep in mind when planning a project.

Together with the renaissance of installation profiles and Drupal distributions, this will make it more interesting to integrate a couple of distributions with a custom site than to try building all the features into 1 site. This is already happening with third party software integration projects such as the Alfresco and Apache Solr modules. A similar distributed feature architecture could however also be very interesting if implemented with a series of specialized Drupal sites.

In this post I'll talk about the pro and contra's of this approach and do a short review of the technologies that could be used to implement it.

In October Jeff Potts had a screencast in which he demonstrated how it's possible to integrate Alfresco into OpenAtrium through CMIS. Since we wanted to do some experiments for a project we are working on we recreated the feature.

We've uploaded the result at our feature server. The feature is at this point only experimental, not for the faint hearted also if you have never before installed Alfresco, be prepared for some troubleshooting, it's not obvious ;)

As you can see on the screenshots below, it does the same what Optaros presented in their video here.

Today Peter activated his brand new Graphmind feature on our intranet/extranet that we built with Open Atrium. The feature adds: a tab to the features menu in group spaces; a view page with the mindmaps in the active group space and a button to create new mindmaps. The feature might be quite basic, but the possibilities are mind-boggling.

Besides of the obvious use cases such as:

• taking notes online

When we first heard about Open Atrium we realized that this had the potential to seriously reduce the maintenance overhead we had on our project management platform.

So as many other Drupal shops we decided to build ourselves a new extranet in Open Atrium.

Some time ago we blogged about Bubbletimer, a module for tracking time spent on projects. Peter Arato, the module's author now also built 2 features that integrates it with Open Atrium:

Time Managment adds a tab on the user space with the Bubbletimer form