Chapter 12. Interfacing with Outside Content
No Web site should be an island. Joomla makes it easy for a site to interface with outside content for everything from downloading Web feed articles to using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for commerce transactions to querying a database for XML data. There are literally dozens of extensions that support numerous types of system interaction. When you can't locate an extension that has the necessary communication capabilities, or you need a custom protocol, Joomla's developer-friendly framework makes it easy to develop your own extensions.
In this chapter, you'll learn how to configure your Joomla site to subscribe to external content and to publish your own on a Web feed. You'll also have a chance to see some of the affiliate programs that can be used effectively with Joomla through extensions created specifically to add the affiliate features to a Joomla site. Finally, you will use the development skills you have already gained to build custom extensions to wrap a Web API (to implement Google Maps), interface with a query server that returns a result set in XML (the U.S. Postal Service ZIP code finder), and develop a simple screen scraper to obtain data from another HTML site.
Pulling in External Content
By connecting to outside content from Web sites and newsfeeds, your Joomla site can supplement native articles. A Joomla site can supplement the existing content using Web feeds that deliver articles automatically for feed publishers. ...
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