Integrating Flare with Drupal

[Bev]

We want to integrate our flare output with Drupal.

How might we do this?

Bev

[kkelleher]

Our Web Team has this working pretty nicely, though I don't know the ins and outs. I've asked the team to put together a brief summary, and will post it if I get something helpful.

Thanks,

Kristen

[Nita Beck]

I've asked the team to put together a brief summary, and will post it if I get something helpful.

Kristen, a summary such as you describe will be real gift to the Flare community. Thank you in advance for that gift.

[kkelleher]

Don't thank me yet! Our web team is absolutely swamped so we'll have to see if they give me something useful.

[Bev]

Thank You. I am looking forward to hearing from your team.

[nielsf]

+1!

[kkelleher]

Quick update: later this week, I'll be meeting with the web developer who concocted this solution. It might take me a bit to get it written up, but I'll try to make some time for it soon.

-K

[jaringer]

Dear Kristen,

I would also be interested to hear how you accomplished the Flare/Drupal integration. Many thanks.

Best wishes,

Jari

[kkelleher]

I wish I had something helpful to share with you. My best information is that they're using a 'parser' to pull apart our tri-pane HTML5 output so that it's in a format that Drupal can handle. It's rather brittle at the moment, so we're investigating simplification, including using the 'no skin' option in the target. We're in the throes of a release, but I've asked our web developer if he could write something up that's more helpful. If I can pry something helpful out of him, I'll let you know.

Thanks,

Kristen

[kkelleher]

Hi again,

I got some high-level information from our web team:

We use a custom HTML parser to import contents from the archives we receive (ZIP files of the project output).
The custom parser will first go look for a sort of index or table of content in the archive.
It then uses these to go through the HTML contents in the archive and import them into Drupal.
For each HTML file, the parser will try to do several things:
- Parse and import the main body of the page and determine if we need to keep page header in the body
- Parse and refactor links to other pages
- Parse and refactor image links
- Remove unnecessary text or HTML

The last step is just to copy all the images to the server where we host the Drupal site.
I think the biggest problem we are facing is that often times the format of the HTML is inconsistent; sometimes it will even be formatted wrong.
When the formats are inconsistent, it will be very difficult to import them properly.
For example, we've seen unescaped HTML inside <pre> tag which is supposed to display java code in a code block.
Or headers that are not tagged or using different styles.
So these docs end up imported into Drupal with slightly different format or other problems.

Hope this help others get pointed in the right direction.

often times the format of the HTML is inconsistent; sometimes it will even be formatted wrong.

I need to ask for more information on this comment so we can figure out if we're using Flare inconsistently, or if this is simply the way of the world when you're dealing with generated HTML. I'll let you know when I get a chance to look into it.

Thanks,

Kristen

[jaringer]

Dear Kristen,

Many thanks for sharing the details how you have accomplished the integration between Flare and Drupal. So it can be done but it will take time an expertise to build a customised tool like the one you have set up. It still seems that quite many Flare users publish their book type tech manuals/guides on a separate web folder not in their normal website structure. This is what we are doing at the moment. Apart from the manuals we also publish individual support articles/FAQs on our website. We would hope to write these in Flare in the future and publish them in Drupal. Is there any existing Drupal modules that we could use for importing the support articles from Flare to Drupal or do we need to set up a customised tool as Kristen and her colleagues have done to accomplish this?

Best wishes,

Jari

[kkelleher]

Disclaimer: I'm no expert on Drupal.

Our Web Team wrote their own importer in PHP, which seems to be what many Drupal developers wind up doing. According Drupal, there's a modules for importing HTML, but that's about all I know on the topic.

Thanks,

Kristen