launchpadblog

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.

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Cool new stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.