Soapbox Engage Blog

After meeting with a new client in Palo Alto early this morning, I showed up about 2 hours late to Day 2 at the Advocacy Developers Conference here in Oakland. Luckily, Gunner let me in without much more than a "morning Ryan!". What a guy.

Today's meetings followed up on the previous day's discussions, and the one that intrigued me the most was the interoperability discussion lead by David Taylor. In the meeting, we had a great mix of content management systems represented, with Joomla, Drupal, Plone, AMP, and May First People-Link. After going around and around with what's important in integration, we finally threw our hands up and said, "let's just pick one small thing to tackle, and see what we can do."

Or as Gunner kept reminding us, "get the low hanging fruit."

We thought it would be interesting to see if we could get our various CMSes to talk to each other. One thing that we thought would be cool would be if we could query data from other CMSes, and then receive data and present it within our own systems.

An example would be allowing a visitor on our Joomla site be able to search other Joomla sites and Plone sites, and then have the data collected and displayed on our Joomla site. While we thought general content would be great, David thought the things that are most often shared among sites was events.

Based on events, we decided that we needed to follow a standard. Unfortunately, we had a very similar discussion regarding events and the RSS Events standard, which as David and Jamie McClellan told us their war stories from trying to get it to work. We decided that we'd build to the GData specs by Google, which is just an extension of Atom.

Probably would be a good idea to really stick to this experiment, don't you think guys? It would be beneficial to our communities to share this data easily.