Using Drupal to Build Web Applications - 8 years later

Eight years ago at the first Drupalcon Barcelona, I co-presented a session covering how to use Drupal as an application framework rather than as a website building tool. The goal: to present how we had turned this CMS that builds public websites into a pure intranet application with secure and tighly controlled content. This was back in the wild-west days of Drupal 4.7, long before fieldable content, Views 1 had just been released, and phptemplate was still a topic of contention. Things were different then, but by how much?

Today, we both still use Drupal for the same reasons, and are building the same types of applications, for even larger customers and audiences. The big questions now are, how accurate were those recommendations? How did they evolve over time? What new tools are available to do the same things? What tools are just crazy? And importantly, what does Drupal 8 have in store for us?

In this session I'll revisit the key tools we used and recommended we made back then; complete with the cheezy 8yr old slides that describe them. I'll correlate those side-by-side with what today's best practices are, and try to take a look at the near term future and what it will look like. After this session, attendees should come out of this session with a more expanded toolset in mind for developing web-based applications, and hopefully have an eye towards where the futureproof tools of Drupal are heading.

Who knows, after this, maybe in another 8-10 years, we'll be able to do the same session and look back at the crazy technology recommendations that were made back in the year 2015!