How to integrate drupal this way?

Question

I don't want to use it to construct the whole site,

instead I want to use it just to manage part of the posts on the site.

Is drupal fit for this kind of job?

EDIT

If the answer is yes,can you provide some guidance here?

I just want to use it to edit/manage the posts,but show it with my own code.

Answer 1

Short answer: Yes, Drupal can do that, though it was not designed for this purpose.

Answer 2

Here's how you can do it; you can configure drupal as a blogging platform.

OK, now you have clarified your question. In order to show the data, maybe you can write your own modules that display whatever result your want. That's one way.

Another way, a very ugly is, in your node page, set your node to accept full PHP, and then start writing PHP MySQL code. Like I told you, this is a very ugly way.

Answer 3

If you want to use drupal as a 'pure backend' and pull in / display the content in some other internet site then you could look at either:

• Using drupal's mostly-generated-out-of-the-box RSS. Perhaps setting up a series of Views in drupal to collect posts together as you required them. Pretty easy to set up but doesn't give you a whole lot of control.
• Looking into the Services module and the various web-services that you can set up with it. I have used this a number of times when I needed to have a Flash frontend to a drupal site, which (conceptually at least) sounds kind of like what you are describing - Services module on drupal.org

Answer 4

You may find that you want to write your own Drupal theme. This would make the front end code your own but keep most of the site working as Drupal does normally. This gives you most flexibility for least work.

Answer 5

First an opinion

Drupal's strong point are flexibility and modularity. Drupal's weaknesses are heaviness and steep learning curve.

The design you are proposing does not take advantage... of the advantages and leaves you with the drawbacks, so IMO - although you can definitively do that - it's not the greatest of ideas, at least judging from the few elements provided in the question.

I would rather look to CakePHP instead, which is still PHP but does natively what you want to do (i.e. having the framework handling the "logic" but letting you writing your own presentation layer). It is also incredibly lighter and faster than Drupal.

That said...

You can do it with Drupal

The easiest way is to use the API's provided by the BlogAPI core module. That is an out-of-the box functionality of Drupal. For anything more complex you could still use the webservices with defining your own functions. If you are not new to drupal (thus you don't have to spend lots of time in learning how views works), a powerful way could be to expose views through the xmlrpc server.

Reading from the DB directly is also a possiblity, but it gets very complex, very quickly (I would say it is at least an order of magnitude more time-consuming and bug-prone than using a webservice).

HTH!

Answer 6

theming would be the best way. however, drupal stores all its data in a very tidy and structured way, so you can probably do the sql calls you need from your cms, or whatever it is you're coding to show everything else in your site. i suggest reading http://drupal.org/node/22754 for especific table descriptions. you'll probably use cck, so i suggest studying its tables just as well. (you can try drupal 7, since it has fields in core, and seems to be even tidier).