I run a nonprofit organization that is using Rails. We’re about to create a collection of new inter-related websites to improve human rights, free modern-day slaves, and help people in extreme poverty who lack food, clean water and basics. We’re considering using Elixir (possibly with Phoenix). Our main hesitation is that it doesn’t have key plugins or libraries we need that would be too expensive to build on our own. An important one is with the large number of inter-related websites, we need users to have SSO to be automatically logged in when they arrive at our other websites. We also want to let people choose between signing up with FB, Twitter, Google or by creating an account without using a social media account.

Someone suggested we do the majority of the development in Elixir, but use the Rails CAS plugin/server to meet our auth needs. I.e. when users log in, we ping the SSO server to verify them, then the rest of their activity interacts with Elixir, and when they go to another website, it recognizes them. How easy is that to set up, and what are common problems/weaknesses to that approach, and how roughly how time-consuming are they to overcome? I read 99% of the thread on Elixir/Phoenix auth, and didn’t see anything that answered these questions.

Likewise, we’d probably use a forums plugin from another framework. I was told PHP has the best full-featured open-source forums plugins. Does each additional language/framework we add to our system create significant problems/risks or is it mild? Right now we only have Rails (plus of course front end things like html or javascript), so I have no knowledge of how easy or hard/costly it is to have multiple languages/frameworks in the same system. E.g. cost of building, cost of maintaining, risks, etc.

I’m not a developer, but I’ve run this nonprofit for 12 years and I’ve done a lot of the UX design and user specs for our past websites, so I understand many of the basics of web dev, though not a lot of highly technical details. I think this likely is a useful topic for potential users of Elixir to hear about because the only real weakness I consistently hear people mention about Elixir is the lack of libraries and plugins. So people having more knowledge about the feasibility of mixing Elixir with plugins from other frameworks, and information about how to mix them, would likely increase adoption of Elixir.