Create and Access Google Sites with Google Apps Script

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Feb 10, 2010

Google Apps Script, which just became available to Standard Edition users last week, can now be used to ease the creation of Google Sites pages.

Full Control

Google Apps Script basically makes life easier by automating a bunch of tedious processes in Google Apps (e.g. reading and changing values in Google Spreadsheets, or creating Google Calendar appointments).

That ease is now moving onto Google Sites, which means users now get to automatically:

Add attachments
Changing the text within a web page
Add new collaborators to sites so friends can jump in and edit as well

It's Great for Soccer

"A good example came to our attention recently as a colleague set about improving the organization of his soccer league," wrote Henry Lau, a Google Apps Script engineer. "He had to create home pages for each of the teams, with information on each of the players in the league. Before long, he was overwhelmed with the task of managing all of the information on these sites.

Poor guy, right? Thankfully he (of course) already had a ton of information about the players stored within Google, like player names listed in Gmail Contacts, and training times and matches listed in Google Calendar. From there, a script was written to pull these details from Google and plug them into new Google Site and all was well.

Retrieve e-mail addresses from Gmail

Think about applying this kind of functionality to the enterprise and we're in business.

"We think this is a great example of taking useful information from semi-private, hard-to-access sources, and sharing it with a wider audience – be it your soccer league, your enterprise, or the entire world," continued Lau.

Interested? Check out Google's quickie tutorial here.