Automated frontend uploader

Is it possible at all to automate the uploading of a sermon, and have it show up on my site automatically? I currently have our recording program launch WinSCP to upload the file to a directory, then i log in to Joomla and add the sermon to the site.

I'd like to know if there is a way to automate everything.

thanks!

You could write your own script which does the necessary entries into the database, but SermonSpeaker itself doesn't offer this functionality.
Maybe in the future I'll do that. The idea is good and it's not the first time I hear it.

Ok, thanks for the reply!

I have this working now as a button in the tools section now. The URL to activate the function is now basically:

administrator/index.php?option=com_sermonspeaker&task=tools.createAutomatic

and it will create a sermon out of all "orphaned" files found in the sermon directory. It uses the same code that is used with the "Search orphaned files" function.

The main question is now how to let a script activate this function without bringing up a ton of security issues.
The easiest way would be to use the URL parameters user and password and login the user using those credentials. But this means you will transmit the password in plain text over the internet and you probably will have it stored in your script.
Another (more complicated) way would be to generate a token in the backend which then needs to attached to the request URL.

I'm not sure yet what would be the best way to go.
Any ideas?

And what exactly are "orphaned" files? I just ran the "Search orphaned files" process under Tools, and it showed some mp3 files that are already associated with a sermon, so why are they considered "orphaned"?

thanks

The function searches recursive in the sermons path and stores all files found into an array.
Next it makes a database query which returns all audio- and videofiles assigned to a sermon from the database and stores it into a second array.

Now it goes through each of the files from the first array and checks if they are present in the second array, deleting the entry if it's found there.

This leaves in the end the files that are not assigned to a sermon.

It may fail if you save the sermons with absolute URLs (starting with http://). It shouldn't fail if you use the built-in dropdown list to select the files in the sermon form.
If that's not the issue, I would be interested in some examples. I would need the info how exactly the path is stored in the sermon form/database and what the local path to the file is.