Inserting dynamic content within pages

Damian Peterson - June 10, 2009 - 20:41

Hi, I'm investigating the possibility of Drupal as a solution for a corporate with multiple websites, multiple users and multiple data sources. I've been impressed so far with Drupal but have come across a bit of a snag which I'm sure is due to something I've missed along the way.

We need to be able to allow our marketing staff create pages that contain products in which they can insert a simple snippet i.e. "[prod_price:123]" (or similar) that will tell that part of the page to insert a price which will be sourced from an external SOAP data source (which happens to be MS CRM).

We need to make it simple enough for marketing to use and I'm hesitant to ask them to have to include raw PHP. Perhaps something similar to the shortcodes used in WordPress.

Is anyone able to explain how we might best go about this?

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You could write a custom

marcvangend - June 10, 2009 - 21:07

You could write a custom module and implement hook_filter. In other words: your module would make a filter available to Drupal. This filter can then be enabled in the input format used by your end users.

For an example module implementing hook_filter, see http://api.drupal.org/api/file/developer/examples/filter_example.module.
For documentation on hook_filter, see http://api.drupal.org/api/function/hook_filter/6.
For general information on creating Drupal modules, check out http://drupal.org/node/508.

Thank you

Damian Peterson - June 11, 2009 - 02:04

Thanks marc. I'll definitely have to look into this. While this is a bit beyond me at this stage it seems that Drupal has the ability to be extended to look for a certain pattern of text within the content of a custom page/node and then go away and 'do something' (i.e. trigger a SOAP request) and rewrite the content of that pattern of text.

Do I have the right end of the stick here?

Thanks once again for your help!

That is correct. I haven't

marcvangend - June 11, 2009 - 07:53

That is correct.
I haven't used flexifilter myself, but I know it's based on the same hooks. The big advantage of flexifilter is the user interface to create filters without programming. I'm not sure if you can set it up to make a call to an external data source, but it's definately worth trying.

http://drupal.org/project/loo

sapark - June 10, 2009 - 21:10

http://drupal.org/project/lootz
http://drupal.org/project/flexifilter

might be starter points to create custom text box filters that reference an external database

Thanks

Damian Peterson - June 11, 2009 - 02:10

Thank you sapark. I had a look at those two projects and, while not too sure about the 'lootz' one, am interested to explore the 'flexifilter' one (which seems similar to what marc above was recommending.

I'll play around with it.

Cheers!