Linking LinkedIn And Drupal

It was some time ago one of our clients, Jonathan at Economist Conferences, expressed an interested in integrating his Drupal website with LinkedIn. At the time he came up with the plan LinkedIn had not yet released their API, but now they have. So the time came for us to revisit the options.

As always, we began by scouring the various bits of Drupal.org for current work. Unfortunately this time there was nothing really usable. Some dodgy old page-scraping, probably breaching LinkedIn terms of service, and a few other bits and pieces, but nothing really solid to use as a base. It fell to us to start the ball rolling, and so we did.

Pascal boldly stepped up to take on development and today we launched the initial development version, ready for user testing and feedback:
http://drupal.org/project/linkedin

Later on in the month the Economist will start using this module too. Right now what you can do with the LinkedIn API is fairly limited, but Pascal did what he could and he used the OAuth module for authentication, to avoid any wheel re-inventing there. So basically you can synchronise Drupal user profiles with LinkedIn user profiles and you can post directly from a Drupal node edit form to LinkedIn as your status, but that's all for now.

Watch this space! As the LinkedIn API gets smarter, so will this module.