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Boilermakers.org is the primary website of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, a union representing skilled craftsmen and industrial workers across heavy industry, shipbuilding, manufacturing, mining, railroads, and related sectors. Members of this union build, maintain, and protect the critical industrial infrastructure that supports everyday life—power, transportation, manufacturing, and energy systems.
The organization supports more than 200 local lodges throughout the United States and Canada, providing members with training, safety programs, advocacy, and career resources. Backdrop CMS is a strategic part of the organization’s hosting infrastructure.
In 2025, Fibonacci Web Studio implemented a fully open-source, cost-free Single Sign-On (SSO) solution for Boilermakers.org. The goal was to enable centralized authentication without relying on proprietary SaaS identity providers, licensing fees, or vendor lock-in.
The solution is based entirely on OpenID Connect (OIDC) and leverages the native strengths of Drupal and Backdrop CMS, both of which originated from Drupal 7. A Drupal 11 site acts as the Identity Provider (IdP), while both Drupal and Backdrop CMS sites authenticate as Service Providers using contributed modules for BackdropCMS and Drupal.
All components of the system are open-source, actively maintained, and suitable for production use in environments where transparency, security, and long-term sustainability are essential.
This architecture is especially well-suited for organizations managing multiple related websites—such as higher education institutions, nonprofits, or research networks—that need centralized authentication without recurring costs. It also demonstrates how modern identity standards can be implemented cleanly using community-driven tools.
