Programmatically Creating Drupal Nodes

The Drupal for Developers event was great fun this week. I did a 15 min presentation on Programmatically Creating Drupal Nodes. The slides from this presentation will be going up on the Drupal UK site in the near future, but you can get a preview of the presentation below.

Some of the other developers were able to contribute their own experiences, in particular about how painfully slow drupal_execute() can be.

I presented a case study from a site I have been working on recently where over 5k of content items had to be imported from XML data. I talked about setting up the content types with CCK (and ImageField) as well as creating a compound CCK field in a module, and what hooks to implement in order to create a simple Custom compound CCK field type.

I then went on to explain the import process, converting XML to an array of $field_values for use with drupal_execute().