Integrating DSpace with Drupal

The CCAFS story

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

WHERE WE STARTED

• A Drupal 6 website to be revamped and ported to Drupal 7

• A DSpace repository with all the CCAFS publications archive

• Need to seamlessly integrate the two systems

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

WHERE WE ARE

• Drupal 7 website with publications automatically updated from DSpace repository

• Seamless navigation

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

WHERE WE ARE

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

KEY FEATURES• Publications are Drupal nodes✓ Searchable

✓ Taggable and browsable with taxonomy

✓ Accessible using Views

• Unified user experience

• Complete control on markup and layout

• Responsive interface

• Better SEO

• Social sharing

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

HOW WE DID IT - 1

• DSpace REST API development has been stopped in 2011

• Open source alternatives are not stable and not suitable for production use

Wednesday, October 30, 13

W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M

HOW WE DID IT - 2

• DSpace exposes all pages content as XML

• This pagehttp://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/33836

is also available as XML herehttp://cgspace.cgiar.org/metadata/handle/10568/33836/mets.xml

• Similarly you can access XML representations of publication listings, for example by collections

Wednesday, October 30, 13

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HOW WE DID IT - 3

• We wrote a custom proxy that takes an XML listing and fetches all data from single publications URLs, merging the results in a single XML

• We then feed Drupal with that XML, using Feeds + Feeds XPath parser + Feeds tamper modules

Wednesday, October 30, 13

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HOW WE DID IT - 4

• The importer takes data fields from DSpace and applies transformations that allow to automatically tag publications with Themes and Regions taxonomies

• The import process only affects new or updated publications, and doesn’t require a complete re-import in every run

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Questions

Wednesday, October 30, 13