I've been meaning to post about this for quite some time. We talked about the reverse bounty concept at DrupalCon. What this means is that a developer writes up a spec/requirements doc/idea for some Drupal development, and then also estimates how much time/money it would take to get it built. People then donate, and when the estimated money level is reached, the developer builds the code.

I want to test this model, and have an idea for a small chunk of code. The concept is to simulate adding a password to your .htaccess file, except doing it in PHP directly, and hooking it into the existing Drupal user database. So, you can have a completely private system, and turn this on or off, directly from within Drupal. One of the things that this would also enable is authenticated RSS feeds (secure, too, if you run SSL): by using user:pass@example.com/node/feed you would get all the nodes that your user has permission to see. This would be tremendously useful for private organic group feeds.

I've written this up on the securesite.module page at Donorge. I estimate that this would be a relatively simple, small module. The bounty is thus being set by me at $500CDN. Bryght will guarantee that the module gets built if the bounty is reached, although we will likely pay a developer in the community to build it. And in this case, we'll pay the difference between the donations and the full bounty -- so it WILL get built. By donating, you are indicating your support for having this functionality built.

You can donate using Donorge. This will also be a test case for that system as well. Currently an entry for Drupal.org isn't in the system, so I can't funnel a percentage of donations that way. I did include a 5% tip to Donorge.org itself.

Please post questions/comments here, or use my contact form to get in touch privately.