Drupal - A 15 minute talk

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation to the local tech community here in Newcastle Upon Tyne at Super Monday. It's title "Surf More. Work Less. Rapid Web Development - With Drupal". In brief, it was a 15 minute overview of Drupal, where I discussed and demonstrated how to rapidly develop a website or application using drupal and the building block modules that are; CCK, Views, Panels. Also thrown into the mix for good measure were; Location and FiveStar. 

15 minutes. That's not very long to introduce a framework such as Drupal and it's associated contributed modules, in such a way to encourage it's adoption amongst the tech community in the North East. So I decided that if I built something then I could really show off it's power. So that's what I did.

In 45 minutes (pre-presentation), I developed a working prototype of a site/ application that allowed registered users to create and publish information about surf spots - places where one can catch waves, not browse the internet. This included the uploading of pictures, geo-coding a surf spot with the help of a map, and finally allowing other users to comment and discuss the surf spot. Not too bad for 45 minutes work, which included the time to download, select the modules I needed and build the site. All without a line of code written by myself. True point-and-click prototyping.

The Building Blocks

• CCK Content Construction Kit - Domain models, how you represent your data.
• Views - Quickly build views of your models (data).
• Panels - Layout your data, and views.
• Location -Tie your data to geographic locations (places).
• Five Star - Voting widget that hooks into the voting api.

That's it, and here's the video of that talk. One thing to note is that, thanks to Apples insistence on switching their connectors at every available and non-essential opportunity. I had to convert and then run through powerpoint - so some of the slides are a bit off. The slides are available on slideshare, as they were supposed to look.