Remote content user interface

This project extends the Drupal user interface from a "local" site to allow for the visual design and edit of content stored in one or more "remote" databases. This project defines a remote database as a database:
- other than the primary (or a slave) database for the "local" site
- associated with another site, often as its primary database

Visual design includes the use of Views and Panels on the local site to create displays of content domiciled on a remote site. In other words, the remote database is another source of content for the local site. Also, users have the ability to seamlessly create and update content stored in a remote database while working from the local site.

Use cases

An organization maintains a group of sites with one site being the repository for a certain type of content such as news or calendar events.
Example 1: an organization with individual sites for member groups of the organization.
Example 2: a university with a main site and separate sites for each school or college.
Example 3: a business with separate sites for individual business units.

Background

Drupal comes with the ability to define and use multiple database connections during a single request (see link to settings.php or database configuration). This ability is available to a developer in code, but is not exposed in an interface available to users of a site. For example, a content editor designing a view has no way to specify the database connection to use (other than a slave connection which is usually a replicated version of the primary database). But to access content that is native to another site is not possible (to the best of my knowledge).

Definitions

- the local site is the site that content will be displayed on
- the remote site is the site that content will be stored on

This project was initially sponsored by Creighton University.