Forum OpenACS Q&A: Incremental transition of old site to OpenACS

I have a client with the desire to add the OpenACS calendar facility to our portal. Our current portal runs under Apache using NeoWebScript, which is also a Tcl-based toolkit. We would like to eventually port the entire site to OpenACS, and we have a strong desire to immediately (within one or two months) capitalize on the functionality of OpenACS's calendar package, along with some kind of polling application (hopefully the polling module will be published soon).

I'm looking for ways to accomplish this. Basically, we'd have, for some transition period, two sites that should appear seemless from a user standpoint. However, I'm willing for OpenACS to listen to another port.

I already have a user database of course (in OpenLDAP) in the older system.

There are too many variables to lay it all out here, so I'm just looking for some thoughts, ideas, direction, etc.

One question I have is whether I should try to get OpenACS to use the OpenLDAP user base directly, or just replicate changes into Postgresql for OpenACS to use. Replication is probably cleaner and easier to implement (I don't have Oracle, so I would have to port the LDAP package to use Postgresql in some way -- the package currently relies on Oracle's ability to access LDAP).

Another thing that would be highly desireable is single login -- authentication on one side would be recognized by the other. I can force users to hit my old site first. Would it just be a matter of setting some cookies to make OpenACS happy?

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Posted by Rafael Calvo on
Randy

With the Gatekeeper package you can easily (in 5 min) have both sites running together as if they were one for the users. You can see it in action at
http://www.weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/usyd that has the university iste running in it:
http://www.usyd.edu.au

As of LDAP, I don't think the package was completely ported but there are several threads about it in the bboard