By yngens on

Because of number custom modifications and because upgrading lots of modules for Drupal 6 takes time I would like to keep my website as Drupal 5.x, but to move just some part of it to Drupal 6.x. For instance I would users of my site to blog in Drupal 6.x, rather than in Drupal 5.x. So if my current website in Drupal 5.x is http://www.mysite.com I would like to install Drupal 6.x on http://new.mysite.com and share users between these two installations. This kind of installation would give me a possibility of gradual transfer of my website to Drupal 6.x - I could keep current website with all the modules except those which are already upgraded to work with Drupal 6. Whenever a module is upgraded for Drupal 6 I could install it on new.myste.com, disable it on www.mystecom, transfer all the related datas in the tables (wherever it is possible).

Unfortunately, most of the multiple site installation instruction I found searching Drupal.org are related to different Drupal installations of the same version with single database with prefixed tables. In my case I would like to keep two websites completely separate from each other, but to share only users table.

So my question is what is the best way to achieve this? Will there be any problems if I synchronize some fields in users tables of two databases like 'uid', 'name', 'pass', 'mail', which seem to be the same in both versions of Drupal? What happens if I also synchronize common fields of sessions tables?

Comments

yngens’s picture

yngens commented

Would this http://devbee.com/sharing_drupal_tables_between_da work in my case?

drcoachchris’s picture

drcoachchris commented

Is there any reason why you couldn't just point two separate instances (any two separate instances) at an external directory server (AD or OpenLDAP) and share the users that way? It might be simpler for this application, and the LDAP server can be integrated with other applications as well. This might be a more complicated solution than you were looking for, but architecturally, it gives you extensive user management abilities that you might be able to leverage elsewhere.