I am looking for some best practices advice. I am building a module that processes machine tags. I am integrating it in with FeedAPI and FeedAPI Mapper. My two primary feeds I want to get machine tags from are Flickr and YouTube. Unfortunately for both services I have not found a way to get well formatted tags via their RSS feed. So I am resorting to getting the media id from the feed then using an API call to get the machine tags.

Overview: Adding outbound methods of communication to Drupal. The services module exists to allow other services to communicate with Drupal but there is no easy way for Drupal to tell other services information about its own content.

Description: There are a number of services which would be beneficial for Drupal to implement. I think that building them as a set of actions would probably be best, as actions already provides a simple event mechanism for when things should be pushed out.

[ Abstract ]

Details:

Files:

gdata.module: Main module file, the core of the gdata module. This module registers the menu /gdata/. This is the "root" path/URL for the module. Other modules who want to exchange data using the GData protocol have to use hook_gdata( ). Information on implementing this hook is given in gdata.module file. The file also reads all requests coming at /gdata/ and checks for the type of request (read, write, update, delete, search) and the module at which it should go (node, blog, etc. as registered using hook_gdata). Then it simply calls the needed module's _gdata() function so that the request can be handled by the intended module.

Well this is the status:
The core module is almost done, except for the authentication part.
The module, as was planned, has a hook _gdata.
Other modules implement the hook to give 'read', 'write', 'search', 'insert', 'update' or 'delete' services as needed.
I am implementing the hook for node and blog modules.
I possibly cant implement the hook for all modules available.
The authentication right now is the usual Drupal one, NOT Google Authentication. I will add Google Auth soon. Till then we have full permissions and control through the normal Drupal system and it works fine.
Some code may need some fixing. I am still checking / testing and updating as required.

I have again started re-working on the module since last Saturday (before that I was stuck due to exams). Looking at all options that I am aware of and using my knowledge to the limit (well almost) I have come up with the following structure: