Justin Gatewood's Comments

Honestly, I have not had the time to move beyond 1-to-1 editing/publishing of static content into developing interactive solutions, although I am seriously exploring an XML export of real-time course catalog/schedule data from our main ERP system to provide a better online class schedule search interface...

I am hoping to have something started in test before the end of this calendar year.

SUNY Stonybrook already did that (using OmniUpdate) and their freshman catalog is now online (using XML/XSL) and is published simultaneously as XHTML and PDF each time it's updated.  It's online at: http://sb.cc.stonybrook.edu/bulletin/current/

Thanks Justin for looking into that for me!   Have you used other languages , like PHP, JSP or ColdFusion to extend functionality into your web pages?   If so has that been hard or difficult?  Any gotchas?  Thanks again.

Joe,

As I did not know the complete answer to your question, I inquired of OmniUpdate Support, and they provided the following response:

"In this scenario, (getting content/data) you would not want an API direct to OU Campus. OU Campus is a push system, where content is created and edited on a staging server then pushed to the production server. An outside app that was interested in up to date content would want to get that content/data from the production server to ensure that it was receiving approved content ( not all content on the staging server will be approved or is ready for the live site/production server).

In this case, based on what content/data is desired, we would configure content to be published in a standard consumable data format ( JSON or XML). New pages, content created in OU Campus can produce multiple outputs to the production server (.pdf, JSON, XSML, CSV etc) from one .pcf file. Then a server side language would be used to reference that data on the production server.

Open APIs to OU Campus are on road map , but not necessarily to access content as I mentioned above you want the content that is on the production server. The APIs will allow institutions to perform actions within OU Campus from an external website/webapp.( A mobile app that would allow admins to check in content, or approve pages, create users , etc)."

I hope this provides you with the information you need!

Justin

Does OmniUpdate let you reference the content stored in it via an API?  IE I have an outside app that wants some standard content stored in CMS but want to reference it directly from CMS so if it gets updated my App will pick up the new content.  

Is it easy to extend with other web programming languages, PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP?

Thanks for your quick prior response.