Is it possible to update an article remotely?

Question

I'm maintaining a few software support sites in Joomla where parts of the content is web-formatted copies of user manuals and technical documentation.

Since the source for this information is stored under version control (SVN, Git, ...) it is quite tedious to manually update the same information by logging in to the Joomla admin and manually finding the things that need to be changed, not to mention to even remember to do that.

I can automate the generation of HTML-source suitable as an article in Joomla. But how can I remotely, from a script, update particular articles in an existing Joomla site?

Remote update of the DB tables? Doesn't feel stable and safe enough.

Any other options?

Answer 1

I've got a few suggestions that I've done in the past

1. We added a jQuery page to our B/E for these kinds of utilities, using $.post, we mimic various POSTs that Joomla performs when saving Articles, Categories, etc. The trick to this is insuring that that you include the Joomla Token in the POST so that it authenticates properly

2. Check this Extension (or similar) to upload your new article content via a spreadsheet. This one is free, so it might be a good starting point if you want to use a source other than an excel spreadsheet.

3. Also, we wrote an email handling task a few years back for the site that checked a mailbox for "special" email content that it recognized as content for the site, and it updated with that. It's quite dated, so sharing the code would be pointless, but it worked pretty good.