Liferay or Drupal integration

[pcharsle]

We need to provide a public website as the presentation frontend to Alfresco. Users will access our web site and when they login, they will be logged in to Alfresco Share. Our web site will also contain content published in Liferay. Both Liferay and Drupal seem to be popular choices. However, I have a few questions that hopefully someone can help us with:

1. Integrating with another application would mean that there would be another database to manage. For instance, the Drupal database has its own tables with users, permissions and groups that are similar to those in Alfresco. This would mean that the user would have to login to both applications. What is the best way to manage this? Perhaps using LDAP to hold the user and group data? Or is there a way to avoid having to use Drupal authentication at all?
2. Drupal seems a simpler choice since it is very modular whereas Liferay comes with a full suite of collaboration tools which are already implemented in Alfresco Share. Can anyone point me to other reasons why I would choose one against the other?

[resplin · Accepted solution]

There are a lot of ways to integrate Alfresco with a web presentation tier. In general they break down into the following categories:

* Use the CMIS API to query Alfresco
* Query Alfresco with custom web scripts
* Publish from Alfresco using the file transfer receiver
* Embed Alfresco screens into the web presentation tier (iFrame)

The integration approach you take will determine how to handle user authentication and authorization. Many solutions would require a mixture of approaches.

1. If a user needs to be logged into both platforms (not necessary depending on how the content is transferred), then LDAP and a single-sign-on service is the common approach. In our internal Drupal integration, we wrote a Drupal module to pull user and group data from Alfresco over CMIS. It wasn't a difficult module, and is very specific to our environment, so we haven't released that code.

2. Choosing between Drupal, Liferay, and some other approach is a question of what trade-offs are most important to you. My team likes Drupal, but I have been disappointed with it. Liferay seems to be a better architected solution, but I have very little experience actually building things with it. If I had complete control over the decision, I would build with Django and Alfresco via the cmislib (http://chemistry.apache.org/python/cmislib.html). The django-alfresco module looks like it might also prove helpful (http://code.google.com/p/django-alfresco/).

For reference, we have been working on a Drupal module to help pull content from Alfresco:
http://drupal.org/sandbox/IanNorton/1270012

Also for reference, I have recently contributed to these two threads regarding Alfresco and Liferay which might prove helpful to you:

https://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=42289
https://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=42290