I am working on a project that will have a master Drupal site / database. Other Drupal sites will be on kiosks and otherwise not really connected to the internet on a regular basis. The idea is to populate the master site with all content, and then publish a catalog of content the users can download / add to their kiosk when time allows. This means, therefore, I won't be able to use the API to insert content, as the NID will quickly get out of sequence. Can someone recommend how I might then create update packages for the kiosks? I'm guessing I need a script outside of Drupal to create a binary update / executable for each NID and similar. Upon being downloaded, this would do a normal MySQL run to insert data into the appropriate tables. Anyone done this before? Is there a better solution? particularly one that keeps me inside Drupal?
By kxerc on
Comments
Trying to understand
If you don't use the API to create nodes then you risk getting your drupal db out of sequence (on your kiosk sites) at which point your toast. Adding anything to the drupal db with straight SQL is risky business.
The part I am confuse about is why do the node id's need to be kept the same between the "master" and the "kiosk" sites? Content is content. If you have some routine that runs when a kiosk site "downloads" content from the master site why not just let the kiosk assign whatever id to the node it needs to?
You may be right.
You may be right, except if I try to create links between content -- ie: any reference within the site to content that is not from a view or other generic list might break or be incorrect. Basically if navigation is based upon NID, then I'm screwed if these remain inconsistent between kiosk. The only thing I can think of, is to use some sort of generic name, like file path for navigation, but I'd have to look more at the tables to understand if custom file paths ultimately rely on a standard NID.
Well I can tell you that all
Well I can tell you that all node paths ultimately rely on the NID.
I am working on a similar
I am working on a similar concept, a central repository for content to be distributed to a collection of Drupal sites all deriving from the same installation profile.
My approach so far, although not net implemented, will be to create an RSS view for each node on the master site (using the nid as argument), and then have the remote sites incorporate those nodes over RSS via the feedAPI module.