Programming

I think a lot of people, particularly developers, have misconceptions about the CCK module. I too misunderstood its real purpose and functionality when I first came across it. It's most definitely not a substitute for custom modules that create node types. It fills a current shortcoming of Drupal, which is the ability to add properties to nodes. I'm confident that Drupal will eventually abstract its node model to allow for more flexibility and more advanced features like node grouping and relationships. Meanwhile, CCK is doing a decent job at filling in some of the missing pieces.

So let's say you want to share a users DB between two drupal sites, A and B.

For site A, you configure your settings.php normally. This will be your master DB.

In site B, you point user related tables to site A's database:

I got this little snippet off of drupal.org somewhere, but it's proving remarkabley handy for everyday development.

Create a php node with the following content:

I've got a problem I'm trying to solve.

I want to a module to manage inter-related data sets.

Imagine a chain of retail stores that carry different products and have a multiple ongoing sales. We'll call the module "storemanager".

Each store will have its own properties along with various active sales and its own unique products. Each sale will have properties plus a list of products that make up the sale. One or more stores may have the same sale. Finally, products will have properties, and they may be present at one or more stores and in one or more sales.

Problem:

You have a "master" database that contains data from multiple Drupal sites and you want to share it among them. Normally, you could use table prefixing to allow each of your sites to point to a single table. But what if you do not want content from one site to "bleed" across to the other sites? Let's say you have a network of Drupal sites sharing a user database. You want to share that user's information across your entire network of sites, but only make the information visible from those sites to which the user has subscribed. Or maybe you want to populate baz.com with users who meet some arbitrary criteria. There are lots of possibilities here, but nobody's paying me to write this, so let's get on with it.