Drupal - gluing people and code together
On the surface, the three-year-old Drupal system is optimized for
community oriented sites, providing clean, XHTML compliant CSS layouts
in a default installation. An important design consideration for the
development community is user-friendly, accessible code that works for
those with disabilities.
The core is in active development, and not only provides a good base
for sites focused on community building, but also efficiently glues
together different components and technologies. This allows Drupal to
have many out-of-the-box features such as distributed authentication,
community authoring, and extensive support for RSS output. Even RSS
aggregation is supported, allowing Drupal to act as an online news
aggregator in the style of Bloglines or MyYahoo.
The core modules are cleanly coded and provide a good base for
extension by contributed functionality such as multiple templating
systems, text markup languages, and WYSIWYG editors. The minimalist
codebase also includes proven caching and throttling capabilities,
allowing Drupal to survive heavy page requests (even a Slashdotting!)
while continuing to serve up dynamic pages. The developers embrace
reuse: It is hard to find any duplication in the core code, making
for a consistent interface and flexible content publication
capabilities. The system is focused on supporting the UTF-8 encoding,
enabling sites to mix text in different languages across the entire
site, and even on the same page.
This presentation will provide an overview of the key interoperability
features of Drupal, highlighting the high volume of code reuse within
the core. Some of the most interesting contributed modules will also
be covered, and insight will be provided into how one can plug in
one's own custom modules.
About the speaker
Gabor Hojtsy is a student at the Budapest University of Technology and
Economics. He had sessions at several conferences in 2002 and 2004 in
Frankfurt and Amsterdam respectively, and was a defining member of the
2003 and 2004 Hungarian PHP Conference organization teams. He is an
active contributor to the PHP project as an editor of the PHP Manual
and a webmaster of the php.net website. He is a Drupal contributor since 2003 September and has contributed various improvements and modules to
the core. He is the maintainer of the core locale module (interface
translation services).
community oriented sites, providing clean, XHTML compliant CSS layouts
in a default installation. An important design consideration for the
development community is user-friendly, accessible code that works for
those with disabilities.
The core is in active development, and not only provides a good base
for sites focused on community building, but also efficiently glues
together different components and technologies. This allows Drupal to
have many out-of-the-box features such as distributed authentication,
community authoring, and extensive support for RSS output. Even RSS
aggregation is supported, allowing Drupal to act as an online news
aggregator in the style of Bloglines or MyYahoo.
The core modules are cleanly coded and provide a good base for
extension by contributed functionality such as multiple templating
systems, text markup languages, and WYSIWYG editors. The minimalist
codebase also includes proven caching and throttling capabilities,
allowing Drupal to survive heavy page requests (even a Slashdotting!)
while continuing to serve up dynamic pages. The developers embrace
reuse: It is hard to find any duplication in the core code, making
for a consistent interface and flexible content publication
capabilities. The system is focused on supporting the UTF-8 encoding,
enabling sites to mix text in different languages across the entire
site, and even on the same page.
This presentation will provide an overview of the key interoperability
features of Drupal, highlighting the high volume of code reuse within
the core. Some of the most interesting contributed modules will also
be covered, and insight will be provided into how one can plug in
one's own custom modules.
About the speaker
Gabor Hojtsy is a student at the Budapest University of Technology and
Economics. He had sessions at several conferences in 2002 and 2004 in
Frankfurt and Amsterdam respectively, and was a defining member of the
2003 and 2004 Hungarian PHP Conference organization teams. He is an
active contributor to the PHP project as an editor of the PHP Manual
and a webmaster of the php.net website. He is a Drupal contributor since 2003 September and has contributed various improvements and modules to
the core. He is the maintainer of the core locale module (interface
translation services).