Automatic Scheduled Loading of CCK Nodes

Special Scheduling for the Holidays: This is the only meeting for November & December!

Presentation slides on slideshare: Auto-loading of Drupal CCK Nodes

If you need to grab lots of records from disparate sources and load them into Drupal as CCK nodes, you need to either hire a small army for data entry, or you need to automate it. If you need to do this often, you need to schedule it. In this presentation, I will show how we at UMN Libraries did both with Drupal for ethicshare.org.

This is a common problem, which the IT industry usually calls Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL). Some people, like library geeks, like to call the extracting "harvesting" and the transforming "crosswalking", but they're peculiar. Anyway, an ETL system is exactly what we built for ethicshare.org. Such systems can be incredibly complex. Though we tried to keep ours as simple as possible, there's still much I could cover, including:

• programmatically loading CCK nodes with drupal_execute
• scheduling Drupal tasks with cron
• executing Drupal tasks from the command line with drush
• executing SimpleTest tests from the command line
• putting non-Drupal-dependent code in separate modules so that it can be tested outside of Drupal
• integrating OO PHP modules, including your own, with Drupal

I could go on. I'm still working on my slides, so any feedback on what you would like me to cover would be much appreciated!