In addition to the powerful tools dotCMS has for displaying content dynamically, dotCMS also handles the ingesting and displaying content from external sources. Here is a list of the integration tools that allow dotCMS to ingest external content:
Ingesting External Content
The Import Tool: A great alternative to an iframe, the import tool can be used to insert the contents of the named resource into the template. In the documentation example the import tool is used to ingest Yahoo.com's homepage inside dotCMS. See the Import Tool documentation.
Pull RSS Feed Macro: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. The dotCMS Pull RSS macro allows you to pull an external webfeed or "channel" to retrieve full or summarized text, publishing dates, authorship, etc. Many news, media, social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide RSS feeds/pages which can be ingested by dotCMS. See the Pull RSS Feed Macro documentation.
XML Parser: XML (Extensible Markup Language), is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. Many XML-based languages have been developed including RSS, Atom, SOAP, and XHTML. The dotCMS XML Parser tool allows you to use Velocity to iterate over the XML objects retrieved from an XML page. See the XML Parser documentation.
JSON Servlet: JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), is a lightweight text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange and is a nice alternative to XML. The dotCMS JSON Servlet allows you to ingest a JSON object and use Velocity to iterate over each child object with simple velocity that is easy to manage and read. See the JSON Servlet documentation.
The getSQLResults Macro: Many webmasters have the need to pull data directly from their own dotCMS instance or from an external database. The getSQLResults macro allows web masters to run SQL queries against an internal/external database and iterate over the results of the pull using simple Velocity. See the getSQLResults Macro documentation.