i thought i'd post this here because multisite installations are often concerned with security and serving lots of registered users.
1) does drupal offer a consistent way to allow users to specify and present aliases wherever published content and profiles are viewable on a drupal site? any modules or recipes for large user bases?
i can hack this in theming functions for a couple of users but it becomes extremely hard to maintain across a large user base that continually changes.
i think a drupal weakness is that login ids are used to id site users. others may disagree that this is a weakness from a security standpoint (e.g. one less thing for people to guess to crack an account). however, aliases seem to be a good feature for clarity, privacy and usability reasons.
so does drupal provide user aliases that seemlessly are replacements for wherever user ids are used on live sites? anybody know if this will be included in d7 or greater?
2) since multisite is often served by the same ip address, anybody know of a good way to force ssl only on "/user/" and "node/add|edit|etc/" paths.
i don't want to slow down basic site viewing of published content, but i'd like to secure at least the user login portion for multi site users so passwords arent' transferred in cleartext.
any recipes (a sample apache vhost) would be great
thanks