Building Web Applications with Drupal

We all know that using Drupal, you can build stellar websites. What if you want to build a web application?

Web applications have different demands than websites; they focus on storing, presenting, summarizing, and analyzing user specific data in a friendly interface. We will discover that using contributed code, Drupal a perfect fit for developing web applications, and will distill how web applications are different from websites from a site builder's perspective. We will look to mainly use available modules in Drupal 7 to avoid coding solutions from scratch, but will also touch on additions in Drupal 8 that make Drupal an even better fit for these types of projects.

Web Application Essentials Covered:

• User specific configurations, profiles and user permissions
• Importing, Handling and Organizing user’s data, including generating metadata for larger files
• Visualization and analysis of data with tables, charts and maps
• Optimizing authenticated user experience in usability and performance since all users are authenticated

Intended Audience
Attendees should have an understanding of content types & fields, views, and how to research and install modules. This session is aimed at site builders, so we will refrain from providing “develop your own module to do this...” as a solution. That said, all backgrounds are welcome as this often overlooked use for Drupal can open up interdisciplinary discussions on how to make Drupal & Contrib even more useful for web application development.