Drupal 7.x

I newly registered to drupal.org - so first of all, hi and thanks to the community, that made drupal the reliable and (very) flexible solution for building websites that it is.

Hi

After successfully completed initial configuration of Drupal (using default theme), it Drupal transistions from Finished page and open Administrator page: http://foo.bar.net/#overlay=admin

However, here are the problems I am experiencing within Administrator page:

I'm working on an ldap authentication module as part of the ldap project for drupal 7. Since other external authentication modules need to migrate to 7 and this functionality is critical to security, I wanted to get some feedback on d7 workflow, hooks and functions related to authentication.

Please let me know if there is other good discussion and resources on this besides api.drupal.org, http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules--user--user.api.php/7, the drupal core issue queue, and http://drupal.org/update/modules/6/7 Or any d7 code from other external auth modules. If we get a good discussion here, I'm willing to write up the results in a sample module for http://drupal.org/project/examples or some documentation in http://drupal.org/developing/modules

I see at least two types of external authentication workflow:

1. Credentials entered in drupal: enter credentials on drupal site, module verifies, and logs user in.
2. Externally entered credentials: drupal login based on cookie, webserver, token etc such as kerberos, webserver authentication, open id.

I'm interested in case 1. for the ldap_authentication module. Below are my initial notes/psuedo code on workflow that I'm looking for feedback on.

/**
* Implementation of hook_form_FORM_ID_alter().
*/

function ldap_authentication_form_user_register_alter(&$form, $form_state) {
/**

I'm with an engineer-heavy company that currently uses Drupal as an internal knowledgebase. We're looking to really polish the system to fit our company profile and dedicating internal resources to writing and maintaining whatever code is necessary to keep it functioning.

With that in mind, I'm trying to figure out the best way to hire a name-brand consultant and training company to help determine which modules we need, how much functionality we'll need to add to those existing modules, and whether we need to write any new modules to achieve our desired end result.

After uploading the Drupal files and attempting to access install.php, I receive the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '{' in /homepages/26/d163451174/htdocs/lab.davidjbauer/includes/install.core.inc on line 74

I'm lost... any ideas? :/ I've tried the installation from scratch twice and received the same error both times.

Trying to develop a project management dashboard to include the following elements:

Gantt Chart - list of activities, schedule, status

Burndown Chart - Number of activities remaining by date: actual vs. scheduled

List of Risks associated with the project

Buttons for Outstanding Issues categorized by priority (high, medium, low). Clicking on a category button brings up a list of issues for that priority category.

Overall completion percentage (based on number of activites and pct complete of each)