[Phpgroupware-developers] Parttioning phpgroupware for support of several groups fo users on disjoint databases

[Olivier Berger]

Hi.

First my apologies if this topic has already been discussed. I have
looked for information about it but, it's quite hard to find the right
search terms for such a question.

So here is it.

We're using PhpGroupware to develop PicoLibre (www.picolibre.org), which
is somehow a way to provide an easy to use equivalent of
sourceforge/savannah for research or education institutes.

The architectural principle of such a platform is that there are
projects which are very much independant, hosted on the same platform.
Some of the developers may belong to different development projects, but
data relating to the different projects are confined in each project's
view.
For instance, the todo-list of every project is distinct (same for bugs,
etc...).


PhpGroupware is not structured (correct me if I'm wrong) in such a way.
As I understand it, it's mainly devised for a single group of users (for
instance a department in a company, or say a free software project), who
are using the instance of phpgroupware. If need is for another group,
there would probably be another whole instance of phpgroupware needed.


If trying to map the first model on to the second one, actually, that's
what we did in PicoLibre, this means that almost every elements in the
database need to have a new relation to the "project" partitioning key,
which means rewriting most of the database code if we intend to reuse
some of PhpGroupware applications.


I wonder if you've already discussed this issue, and potentially thought
about evolution, for instance for some kind of "virtual host" or
"metaproject" partitionning scheme of the whole data handled by  a
single instance of phpgroupware ?

Thanks in advance for your help/thoughts on this idea...

Best regards,


P.S.: btw, picolibre was finalist of the free software trophies... and
of course phpgroupware deserves many thanks since much of the
infrastructure of picolibre relies on phpgw. Thanks guys. More details
on http://www.picolibre.org/fstrophy2003/index.en.html

-- 
Olivier BERGER <address@hidden>
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
INT Evry (http://www.int-evry.fr)
OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC