I've been playing around with creating a drupal module as a migration for the PLC node pages.  The first test is quite promising.  It seems possible to dynamically create special forms that are currently created within the stand-alone .php scripts for nodes/*.php

The advantage of this approach would be tighter integration with the core of Drupal, and therefore the ability to take advantage of it's built-in url parsing, menu-hierarchy generation, and display.  For instance, the link above, will show the 'edit' and 'view' tabs that you usually see associated with content pages like Announcements, or this Blog entry.  This feels like a very natural extension of the model we already have.  Most people can view a node, but only PIs, Techs and Admins can change it.  Maybe only Techs and Admins.

 While doing this I noticed as well that it may be possible to use the Drupal 'caching' feature for our website if we change only the planetlab_menu() function to always generate the context menu.  All other things would be "saved".