CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Yes, you should write a drupal module. I think there are some examples that ship with Civi but basically you should use drupal's form system to add a url to drupal's 'understanding of the world' that calls a civi function that you write.

If you haven't done anything like this before I'd suggest trying to track down a copy of Pro Drupal Development to help you

Thanks!  I've now written my module and it works.  But it seems that doing it that way I have to trigger my code via some Drupal or CiviCRM event, and I didn't really want that.  I wanted to call my module's functions as parts of a cron run's maintenance tasks. 
To me, it's a problem with the whole "hooks" way of thinking. Or am I missing something?     

Okay! I've got it running as a hook, which is nice, AND now I can also call CiviCRM functions directly, without hooks. Here's how I did the latter:

//Bootstrap Drupal
chdir('/my/drupal/root/');
define('DRUPAL_ROOT', '/my/drupal/root/');  //This is a Drupal 7 issue -- it doesn't find the DRUPAL_ROOT otherwise (see http://drupal.org/node/1024624)
require_once DRUPAL_ROOT . './includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

//Call CiviCRM functions
$params = array(
  'first_name' => 'abc3abc3abc3',
  'last_name' => 'xyz3xyz3xyz3',
  'contact_type' => 'Individual',
  'version' => 3,
  'email' => 'xyz3xyz3xyz3@yahoo.com'
);

civicrm_initialize( );
$results = civicrm_api("Contact","create", $params);
print_r($results);