Unified Login

I am pleased to report that I have been successful at creating a single login for all ourmedia.org Drupal sites (even of different versions). It took a while to figure this out and in the end I used a combination of xmlrpc to sync sessions and changed the Drupal settings.php to allow for a shared cookie between all subdomains. It took me several days to figure this out as there were several bugs encountered along the way and lots of testing required (thank goodness many of my colleagues were at a conference and I could get some quality time to work on this - that's a rare opportunity these days). In the end, these posts turned out to have valuable information:

• http://drupal.org/node/74350
• http://drupal.org/node/110281
• http://drupal.org/node/117917

Now I have to write some additional logout code, but that looks fairly straight forward.

One important thing I learned along the way is that hook_auth() is not called for just any login, but only for those that have a server variable set (i.e., seems to be useful only for remote authentication, which is different from what we are doing here).