Using Drupal with External Data Sources

Posted on February 28, 2008 by agentrickard

Alright. It's DrupalCON time.

At each of the last two DrupalCONs, I gave a short talk about methods for using Drupal with external data. Specifically, I focus on using external APIs, secondary databases, and "lazy instantiation" to import large data sets into Drupal. I think it's a good talk, and an important subject for understanding the power of Drupal as a platform. (In fact, the original title was "XML, Mashups, and Drupal-as-platform" back in Sunnyvale last year.)

This year, with a nod towards the spirit of collaboration across the Drupal community, the talk has mutated into a 90-minute session, covering a wider range of topics, and featuring some people smarter than me in a panel discussion.

Neil Drumm of Advomatic, a longtime Drupal contributor, will be discussing batch import scheduling, command-line import processing, and a host of automation techniques that he's developed for dealing with legacy data.

Matt Cheney of Chapter Three will be discussing data scraping, parsing, and auditing; plus enhancing data by using job queues to process batch data.

We're all excited to be presenting, and expect the session to introduce attendees to new ideas for dealing with legacy and external data sets.

For more information, see the official conference page.