We’ve been working on extending the Drupal Service module in order to extract some information off from a Drupal site to be used for various purposes
For reference the base module can be found here: http://drupal.org/project/services
It provides basic functionality that can be extended upon. Due to various requirements for different projects, we’ve built on it to create customized calls that expose data according to our needs.
The module allows calls in multiple interfaces, such as REST, XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, SOAP, AMF among others. We’ve chosen JSON
Here is an example call which returns Garland Template data:
Figure 1: Garland Template JSON
You can protect the exposed data in various ways. Authentication is handled through Drupal logins. Different users can have access to different data.
After login, authentication to the various services are handled by a session cookie
Figure 2: Session cookie for authenticated user
Here is an example of node data for an authenticated user:
Figure 3: Full node data
And for a non authenticated user that is allowed to see limited data. In this case you can see the available data is severely limited compared to the previous example
Figure 4: Guest node data
You can also prevent any response to guests
Figure 5: 401 guest call
The data extracted from Drupal can then be used for your own purposes such as data migration, analytics, etc.