This is the first release of the External Content module, which provides a way of viewing content sourced from a remote system within SilverStripe. The key thing with the External Content module is that it makes content available within familiar SilverStripe mechanisms without actually importing any content across into SilverStripe itself (though there is some import functionality available).

As well as the base infrastructure for making everything connect together, there are 2 connectors being released for people to work with

• FileSystemConnector - A simple connector which retrieves content from the filesystem and makes it available for use in SilverStripe. This forms the basis of the main tutorial for writing a connector
  
• Alfresco Connector - A connector to the Alfresco content management system, an open source document management system. It connects via Alfresco's CMIS protocol, and makes Alfresco content available directly in your site

  Feedback/Feature requests welcome.
  

Hey this looks really nice.
I just skimmed through the tutorial, looks really interesting, well designed and extendable.

The most commonly accessed "external content" I read about here (in these forums) are probably RSS Feeds. A RSS Connector module could be a great addition, don't you think?

Congratulations for the release of the module. Way to go!

Wow great work Marcus. Hmmm I wonder if Sharepoint has a PHP API ;)

I'm actually cleaning up the CMIS API at the moment to make it much more generic, with the idea that Sharepoint 2010 will provide a proper CMIS implementation, and that the rumours of a Sharepoint 2007 CMIS interface aren't just rumours.

The idea with the Alfresco connector had always been to build it first, then generalise it out to become a generic 'CMIS connector'. Some of those refactorings will make it into before the first release.

Hi Marcus,

Can you confirm if this is working with 2.4.0??

I've installed the FileSystemConnector module and External Content module and am attempting to follow http://doc.silverstripe.org/module:external-content-quickstart

All works fine to a point - I get the appropriate menu option - however - when I attempt to 'Create' a new 'FileSystemContentSource', it simply redirects back to the 'Pages' tab in the CMS backend. Whenever I then try and access the 'External Content' tab, a blank page is displayed.

Looking at the MySQL tables, I can see that it attempted to write some values in table 'ExternalContentSource'.

If I delete this entry from the 'ExternalContentSource' table, I am then able to get back to the 'External Content' tab in the backend - however (obviously) - there is no connector created.

This could very easily be a problem on my end (some stupid error I've done when installing) - just checking to see that it definitely worked for you in 2.4.0.

Cheers.

Update:

I found that if I used the module from github (http://github.com/nyeholt/silverstripe-external-content) rather than from silverstripe.org (http://www.silverstripe.org/external-content-module) that this problem is resolved.

Is it possible to update the silvestripe.org module page to reflect this update or provide a link to github to save others from this hassle?

Thanks for the module. I'm looking forward to digging into it and creating my custom connectors.

You beat me to the post.

I've just been going through the (not as quick as I hoped!) process to clean up modules for 2.4.0, and am hoping to get most of them stabilised and released this weekend. Part of that process is updating the modules pages, which should hopefully work a little better now that github has SVN access to its repositories.

Hi, I downloaded all 3 connectors from Git but I am unable to create an external connector in the admin. I click on the create button and nothing happens, also I don't see a "Go" button next to the combobox where it usually sits. Any help would be appreciated.