Integrating Showpad with Drupal: a PoC
Nick
Thu, 03/30/2017 - 20:54

Did you miss last week's Lunch & Learn Event about open marketing in Ghent? Dropsolid CTO Nick Veenhof explains his quick-and-dirty proof of concept for integrating the Showpad environment with the Drupal CMS.
 

In the current economic and digital environment, companies are realising that integrated approaches are the future. The time that, for example, sales and marketing act as individual parts of a company is definitely long gone. Luckily, there are plenty of options available for companies to drive business results, such as open marketing platforms.

Recently we have had the honor to present, together with Showpad & Survey Anyplace, a lunch and learn about leveraging these kind of open marketing platforms to boost customer experience. Showpad and Drupal have many things in common, but how do you make sure you are not managing your assets in two separate places - for example in Drupal and in Showpad? As a company, you don't just want to use the right platforms, but you want to use them in the most efficient way.

In preparation for the lunch and learn, we were asked to demonstrate how the technologies that Dropsolid and Showpad use (Drupal & Showpad API) integrate with one another to maximise efficiency.

The first step was consulting Showpad’s API, which is well documented and can be found when logging into their system.

Here's the short version of the demo:

If you're interested in more details, you can watch the extended version on our YouTube channel as well.

Some of the challenges we faced is that Showpad didn’t have a fully featured SDK for PHP. However, there were proofs of concept available that suggested ways of working with the Showpad API. After some exploration I decided to adapt one and contribute it back to github. The adaptation makes the existing, non compatible, library compatible with Guzzle 6 so that it natively works with Drupal 8’s composer dependencies and thus, the Guzzle version that is shipped with Drupal.

After the library was working as expected, I tried to make a quick and dirty implementation in Drupal. Just a warning: this Drupal code does not adhere to the code standards, nor do I recommend you to implement it this way. It is merely proof that integrating the two is not a work of months, but of mere hours. You can find the Drupal code I used at https://github.com/nickveenhof/showpad-api.

Did you miss our Lunch & Learn? Read the complete recap here.

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