This week saw an important new feature go into the Userpoints Drupal module: XML-RPC integration via the Services module.

What this allows is that external applications and external web sites can now retrieve and update points on your site for users. With this many things are possible, such as:

  • Your Drupal site acting as an award points repository.
  • Your Drupal site acting as a contest repository.
  • Your Drupal site acting as a user reputation repository.
  • Joomla, Wordpress, and other web sites can query and update points on your site.
  • User actions captured in the offline world (e.g. contests, purchases from retailers, airlines, and any other computer application updating points on your Drupal site.

We are sure that much more can be done with this, with a little imagination.

What is the future for this? Lookup of users via an alternate identifier, such as an email address, or OpenID, so the Drupal uid does not need to be stored on the external site/application.

Comments

Sat, 2008/04/05 - 03:18

That's some great news Khalid. I was literally just thinking the other day "userpoints would be really amazing if it provided a web service". I think this is a new measure of Drupal popularity. Mean time between the thought 'wouldn't it be neat if you could do X in Drupal' and actually having X appear on the scene (either by your own efforts or the efforts of others). I suspect the number will steadily drop eventually getting down to zero - when the read_my_mind.module is released.

Sat, 2008/05/10 - 10:01

Means your Drupal site can be like a bank, with accounts for users of other sites. Each account can have transactions (points added, points deleted). It is up to you and the other sites to define what points mean, how they are used, and what actions gain/lose points.
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