I’ve been using Basecamp recently to manage my clients (more on that in another post) and was recently intruigued when the API became available. Put simply, an API enables you to access your data not only through logging into the site but also by writing programs to access/manage your data.

I’m sure people will come up with some amazing uses of the Basecamp API (e.g. Project Detail), but for now there are few (even simple) examples. I played around with some code today because I’ve had a simple use in mind.

I’ve just been too busy lately to update my main site - as much as I want to - but I’ve realised that I can update a part of my main site thanks to the Basecamp API. I’ve written a function to enable me to show current, recent and past projects I’m doing and soon I’ll put that on the home page. You can see the unformatted version here. If you’d like to use/adapt the code, read on.

Please note: this code can probably be vastly improved on, but for now it works. Any suggestions, please let me know.

Here’s the code I’m using now:


<?php
// List projects
$request = 'http://mysite.clientsection.com/project/list';
$session = curl_init();
$user = "username";
$password = "password";
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_URL, $request);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_BASIC);
curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $xml);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Accept: application/xml', 'Content-Type: application/xml'));
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($session,CURLOPT_USERPWD,$user . ":" . $password);
if(ereg("^(https)",$request)) curl_setopt($session,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
$request = curl_exec($session);
curl_close($session);
include('xml.php');
$arr = XML_unserialize($request);
$arr = $arr["projects"]["project"];
function showprojects($projects,$type,$hide=array(),$lastupdated=true){
$hide = array($hide);
echo “<h2>”;
if ($type == “active”)
echo “Current”;
elseif ($type == “on_hold”)
echo “Recent”;
elseif ($type == “archived”)
echo “Past”;
echo ” projects</h2>\n<ul>\n”;
foreach($projects as $key => $value){
if ($value["status"] == $type && !(in_array($value["name"],$hide))){
echo “<li>”;
if ($value["announcement"] != “”)
echo “<a href=\”" . $value["announcement"] . “\”>”;
echo $value["name"];
if ($value["announcement"] != “”)
echo “</a>”;
if ($lastupdated)
echo ” (” . substr($value["last-changed-on"],0,10) . “)”;
echo “</li>\n”;
}
}
echo “</ul>\n”;
}
showprojects($arr,”active”,”Life”);
showprojects($arr,”on_hold”);
showprojects($arr,”archived”);
?>


My function enables you to hide projects you don’t want the world to know about (e.g. “Life”).

I have used Keith Devens PHP XML Parser, so you will need to download that file and put it in the same directory as my script.