Integrating DSpace
with Drupal
The CCAFS story
Wednesday, October 30, 13

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
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Wednesday, October 30, 13

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Wednesday, October 30, 13

WHERE WE ARE
• Drupal 7 website with publications
automatically updated
from DSpace repository
• Seamless navigation
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Wednesday, October 30, 13

WHERE WE ARE
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Wednesday, October 30, 13

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
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Wednesday, October 30, 13

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Wednesday, October 30, 13

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
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Wednesday, October 30, 13

HOW WE DID IT - 2
• DSpace exposes all pages content
as XML
• This page
http://cgspace.cgiar.org/handle/10568/33836
is also available as XML here
http://cgspace.cgiar.org/metadata/handle/10568/33836/mets.xml
• Similarly you can access XML
representations of publication listings, for
example by collections
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Wednesday, October 30, 13

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
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13

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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Wednesday, October 30, 13

Questions
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13