New Launchpad plugins for Drupal

Free software development is an essentially social activity and we’ve built Launchpad to help those interactions — both between people and projects — along the way.

By working on free software through Launchpad you build a picture not only of what you’ve done — reporting bugs, creating branches of code, etc. — but your team memberships can also show what roles you have in different free software communities.

Part of what we’ve been doing recently is to open Launchpad to make it far easier to use that information elsewhere; in particular, the web services API, the bug tracker plugin API and Launchpad becoming an OpenID provider.

Today we’re releasing two modules for Drupal 5.x under the AGPL:

  • openid-launchpad: delegate your Drupal site’s user authentication to Launchpad
  • openid-teams: assign Drupal roles to logged-in users based on their membership of specific Launchpad teams.

Using these modules, you can create a Drupal site that makes use of each person’s participation in your community, as reflected in Launchpad. For example, if you want to allow only members of a core development team to post release announcements to your project website all you need do is create a Drupal role with those permissions and then assign it to the Launchpad team of your project’s developers.

The Ubuntu Fridge news site is one of the first sites to use the modules. It passes user authentication to Launchpad and also grants an editor role to members of the Ubuntu Fridge Editors team in Launchpad.

To use the modules you’ll need to be running Drupal 5.x and also be using our modified version of the Drupal OpenID module (GPL). Full setup details are available in our help guide.

There’s more about both modules and you can report any bugs in Launchpad (openid-teams and openid-launchpad). If you use either of the modules, let us know how you get on!

Update: We’re working on support for Drupal 6.x. You can follow the progress by watching the openid-teams and openid-launchpad branches.

5 Responses to “New Launchpad plugins for Drupal”

  1. Flimm Says:

    This is exciting. Any idea if this will be ported to Drupal 6.x?

  2. MTecknology Says:

    THANKS! I’m excited to get working on using these. I am sad to be dropping to drupal 5.x, but it’s a small sacrifice. Thanks very much.

  3. Stuart Metcalfe Says:

    Porting to Drupal 6.x is definitely planned but the original target was 5.x as that’s what we use for our existing sites. I’m afraid I can’t give you a planned date yet.

  4. Launchpad News Says:

    […] Metcalfe talks about the Launchpad Drupal modules. See our original announcement for help and download […]

  5. Launchpad Blog Says:

    […] loco teams — South Dakota and Quebec — have combined the Launchpad Drupal modules with a customisable Drupal theme to produce the LoCo Drupal […]

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