Crawling Joomla websites without parsing website's html

Question

Nowadays many crawlers are using the REST Api features of most CMSs, to be able to crawl websites fast. WordPress and Drupal have their own REST interfaces so indexing any WordPress website is a simple task for example. What about Joomla? I do know there are REST api components just like com_api, but this is not installed by default on websites. So my question is: are there any simple ways to directly crawl the articles of a Joomla website other than playing with website's html?

Thank you! The data which needs to be extracted: Title, publish date, link, content.

Answer 1

Joomla! 4.0 will have Web Services.

In 3.x, without using extensions or custom code, there's no way to do this for single articles. For article listings (category views) you could use RSS/Atom feed by accessing category view with format=feed parameter appended.

Answer 2

Joomla 3

There are a few existing places to get an API for Joomla! 3.

• https://techjoomla.com/rest-api-for-joomla
• https://www.selfget.com/products/jbackend.html

Joomla 4

Or in Joomla! 4 is a full API

• https://www.joomdev.com/blog/entry/joomla-4-api-introduction
• https://docs.joomla.org/Joomla_Api_Specification
• https://magazine.joomla.org/all-issues/august-2020/joomla-web-services-api-101-tokens,-testing-and-a-taste-test

And here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT9qodsvfZg