Drupal as a front-end for Google Drive
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Out of the box, cloud storage services are not all that useful when you need to collaborate on documents in a organizational context. Most services do a pretty good job for individual use but fall short when you need to manage a complex set of projects. In this post I explain how we are using Drupal as a front-end for Google Drive and how this allows us to better organize our project documentation and create tailor-made workflows that fit our company processes. So far we've been using a combination of a Google Docs Spreadsheet (for overview and tracking) and Dropbox to store and share our official company documents: contracts, purchase orders, offers, invoices. It's great that all documents get synched to a local folder but there are some serious limitations to this approach:
Ideally we would combine the ease of sharing documents of one of the cloud storage platforms with a secondary tool for keeping overview and tracking workflows. That's when we thought about doing this with Drupal, Drupal is a very versatile tool and can easily be used to:
For cloud storage we decided to use Google Drive:
We looked around, but all the existing Google Drive/Docs integration module on drupal.org had too much hardwired business logic to be useful for us. So we built a very minimal integration that:
By separating the business logic from the import module it becomes much easier to adjust workflows or even prototype new workflows on the fly. I've recorded a short demo movie that shows the module in action:
Kristof Van Tomme is an open source strategist and architect. He is the CEO and co-founder of Pronovix. He’s got a degree in bioengineering and is a regular speaker at conferences in the API, developer relations, and technical writing communities. He is the host of the Developer Success & the Business of APIs and the API Resilience podcasts.
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