Using the Evernote module to manage an entire Drupal website with a desktop application

This tutorial is sponsored by the Save Joseph campaign. Only 6 more days to save one man from a roomful of teeth. http://savejoseph.org.

I've recently been using the Evernote module to blog, which has made my life surprisingly more rich. After building the module, I started using it right away and found it was the missing piece in creating a workflow that would encourage quality, rapid posting - something I've always wanted to be able to do. Now that its set up, I feel like I can write with virtually no overhead, and using images - kind of tricky when using webforms and wysiwyg - is about as easy as it can get. Even adding annotations is super simple with Skitch (writeup for a workflow with Skitch is imminent).

The ease with which I can create content made me wonder if maybe I could run an entire Drupal site's content off of Evernote. So I gave it a shot when setting up http://josephcowman.com, and it worked like a charm!

What I've done is set up four separate feeds in the Evernote module, three of which correspond to different content types, and a third which imports unpublished blog nodes with instructions for using and administering the site:

The Gallery feed expects notes with a single image. This image is added to an imagefield and is displayed in a gallery fashion on pages like http://josephcowman.com/gallery and http://josephcowman.com/gallery/untitled. The author can put the image anywhere in the post and it will be stripped out using the HTML input filter.

The Blog and Pages feeds, on the other hand, pulls any number of images in and replaces them with local copies of the images, so they would end up looking something like this blog post.

The idea in setting up the site this way is to make management of the content extremely easy. Since Evernote has a desktop application, all the site admin has to do is create or edit a page in Evernote on their computer (even offline), and any changes get pulled into the site on a cron run. So, no log-ins, no working with web forms, it's just working directly with the content without having to deal with the middle man.

I'd love to see more people experimenting with this kind of integration. It makes for a pretty tight workflow. I even take this a little further with my blog (a more detailed article will be forthcoming) by automatically Tweeting and sending my post to Facebook through Evernote as well.