Programmatically manipulate categories and discussions

philAG

Hi all,

We're a game aggregator and we're starting to integrate Vanilla.

We haven't decided yet whether every game will have its own category, or a shared category for all games with each game having its own discussion topic.

Either way, when we add a game, we need to be able to programmatically create a category/discussion -- and if we're creating it as a category, we need to be able to make its parent the category "Our Games".

If a game is taken off-line, we need to be able to disable that category/discussion.

I saw that Vanilla offers data retrieval via REST GET:

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/17525/vanilla-rest-services

However, this seems more like a job for REST POST.

To make things more complicated, we use jsConnect for SSO, so we can't just mimic the user by instantiating a Zend_Http_Client on our game site, as Zend_Http_Client doesn't interpret JavaScript...unless there's a way to do jsConnect with Zend_Http_Client?

How does one programmatically login (as an admin) and manipulate categories and discussions? Do I have to write that functionality myself?

UnderDog

Very interesting questions, I hope you get lots of responses.
There's also a Vanilla API application, maybe that will help?
I think you need to plug in to the various events (after the game gets added, a category needs to be created, etc)

Just for my curiosity : What do you do with your game aggregator? If a new game comes out, you'll publish things about it? For example : Call of Duty, new version comes out. What will you do with your aggregator?

philAG

@UnderDog said: Very interesting questions, I hope you get lots of responses.
There's also a Vanilla API application, maybe that will help?
I think you need to plug in to the various events (after the game gets added, a category needs to be created, etc)

Just for my curiosity : What do you do with your game aggregator? If a new game comes out, you'll publish things about it? For example : Call of Duty, new version comes out. What will you do with your aggregator?

We aggregate games on http://www.ArmorGames.com -- come play! Warning: highly addictive :)

Right now we're just testing out Vanilla to see how well we can integrate it to replace our existing forums/comments/messaging system. We will not be running our game aggregator directly on top of Vanilla.

Is this the API application to which you refer? http://vanillaforums.org/addon/542-api-json