Sunday, January 15, 2012

Drupal frustrations

After more than 10 years of building all my software and website coding from zero with primary programming languages like VB6, ASP, PHP, ActionScript and JS, I have begun adopting open-source packages due to their advanced feature sets.

My newest exploration is Drupal.  In many ways I am very impressed with its capabilities. However, one task that seems to me to be a simplistic task has cost me more than two days of work, and now it's early on a Sunday morning and it's still consuming my thoughts: How to make the content of a node visible on a non-Drupal external site.

I started by installing the Services 3 module, configuring the REST server and its endpoint. After hours of fruitless research, I finally discovered a posting with a good explanation of accessing Drupal data externally with authenticated access via REST.

My attempts to implement that were unsuccessful. As I posted on drupal.stackexchange.com, the Drupal system would recognize my login and authenticate my session, but I still can't retrieve a node's content.

I posted another request for help on any method to see Drupal node data externally, and received the suggestion to use feeds. So, this morning I have been researching that avenue.  So far, success has been very limited. Based on http://www.group42.ca/drupal_6_rss_omnibus I was able to finally see something from my Drupal site by requesting the url my-site.com/drupal-folder/rss.xml.

However, due to the purpose of my Drupal installation, it is locked down to require authenticated access for everything. At this point I am stymied by two problems using the Atom/RSS technique: I haven't seen documentation to do an auth login to request RSS data, and so far I can only see as RSS what appears on the Drupal front page.

Back to the research...

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