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Promiscuous Drupal: Building Your Site With Web APIs (DrupalCon DC 2009 notes)

Posted by Jeff Schuler - on 06 March 2009

Promiscuous Drupal: Building Your Site With Web APIs
Jeff Eaton

How many folks in this room came to Drupal after trying to build their own CMS? Quite a few... Drupal tends to emphasize homegrown, native solutions to everything.

"Drupal: the blogging software with the worst forum software built-in." -- Walkah

We love Drupal's swiss army knife -ness, but if we don't keep our minds open, and stick to the Not Invented Here -- not use existing tools -- we end up with a humungous unwieldly mess.

Drupal as one tool among many.

Enlarging the Toolbox

Spam Filtering (Mollom, Akismet, etc.)
Searching/Indexing (Solr, Google, Acquia, etc.)
Feed Generation (Feedburner, etc.)
Content Tagging (Calais, TimesTag, etc.)
Authentication (OpenID, etc.)
Sending bulk mail (Mailchimp, etc.)

Whole category of modules for Third-party integration.

Farm out stuff that:

Benefits from centralization
Requires expertise
Demands massive processing or sample data

Taking it up a notch:

Posting links? Use Delicious
Shoutbox? Use Twitter
Photos and galleries? Flickr
Video? YouTube, Blip.tv
Reviewing books? Amazon, Goodreads
Comments? Disqus!
Blogging? Use WordPress!

You will never...

enter product information as accurately as Amazon!
be as popular as Flickr.
write a Firefox Plugin for Link Field
enjoy transcoding your own video!

To take the red pill... two approaches:

become a crossroads
enhance native content
- value add what you're already managing internally

When does this work?

Common on heavily social sites
Facebook
News sites
Personal Aggregators (FriendFeed, Tumblr)
External content is treated as something that lives out there

Users are active on your site even when they're not really doing something on your site.

How?

Aggregator module (themeable now)
Activity module (supports views!)
DayLife API, NowPublic's new service
Native modules (delicious, flickr, etc.)

One step further: using external sources as your primary source of content...

Does this make sense?

How hardcore are you?
How badly do your content producers hate the node form?
External content is treated as something that lives in here
Drupal becomes a presentation engine
Drupal becomes a ... mashup?

How the...?

Native modules
FeedAPI + Feed Element Mapper
Nodes become flexible wrappers
Lay your own pipes (we'll see this later)

Our stack (LAMP + Drupal) ... and 3rd party bits. Moving toward Drupal as one element in the rest of the services system.

Downsides

Filtering the firehose (tagging helps)
"Importing" the internet
8192 auth methods (OAuth helps?)
Even Amazon goes down... but flipside is that there are a whole lot of others tying their fate to same:
Magnolia ...

Congrats, you're no longer a module developer, you're an integration specialist!

Doing it with Drupal:

drupal_http_request()
PHP 5 - SimpleXML & JSON
drupal_write_record()
Expose your tables via Views
Wrap local vs remote
(See Building APIs That Rock)

If you release it

Support the full API.
Fail gracefully
Don't force data into nodes: store stuff in their own tables, and maintain data structure of original source as well as possible. For, say, Amazon integration, just store ISDN # in a node with a CCK field
Cache data whenever you can
Don't write an SQL query builder.. Integrate with Views
PHPDoc, PHPDoc, PHPDoc!

Don't forget

Respect API policies (Limits, Caching)
Don't trust the data you get back
There are cutting-edge options
- CustomViews queries (Flickr?)
- In Drupal 7, FieldAPI supports remote fields
- NowPublic's Aggregation system: building a Drupal site on a front end to back-end APIs/processing built in C++

Leveraging