Presented by Fabio Fidanza at Dspace Ethiopia Interest Group Meeting and Training, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 28 October – 1 November 2013.

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

2. 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
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13

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

4. WHERE WE ARE
• Drupal 7 website with publications
automatically updated
from DSpace repository
• Seamless navigation
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13

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

6. 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
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13

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

8. 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
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13

9. 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
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13

10. 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

11. 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
W W W . M A C A R O N I B R O S . C O M
Wednesday, October 30, 13

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