Clay Loveless wrote last
year an article entitled Stop
Writing Loner Applications in which he ranted about all the
monolithic applications that act like they're the only kid on the block when
it comes to user authentication. Basically, if you want to create a site
that utilizes several third-party, off-the-shelf PHP apps (say, a forum, a
blog, and a wiki), getting a shared authentication to work between them can
be more than a little painful.
I've hit a similar problem repeatedly the past couple months: most of these
apps simply are not embeddable, at least not without modifying the source.
"Why embed?" you ask. Simple: if I'm creating a site that has one or two of
these applications, but also my (or my company's) own custom functionality,
I may want to ensure that certain elements are present on all pages, or that
I can control some of the content in all pages: a unified header and footer,
ability to inject statistic tracking javascript, etc.
The predominant attitudes are either, "Don't embed our app, embed your app
in ours," or "Just modify the templates." Neither of these solutions is
acceptable.
