Case study

Overview

Drupal is increasingly making a place for itself among museums around the world. As a strong and flexible framework Drupal can be a good fit for these sorts of organizations.

This session will be a case study and lessons learned from two museum web sites Palantir has built using Druapl 5: The Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Both sites offered a number of unique challenges but also the opportunity to share amazing and diverse content.

Agenda

* Bringing Drupal into a large, established web presence
* Designing a modern site that still has a strong artistic feel
* Bridging Drupal to legacy multimedia databases, such as museum collection databases
* Drupal as an application framework
* Existing open source museum tools

Goals

We hope to present both the challenges and rewards of integrating Drupal with large, established systems such as those of museums. We also hope to give some insight into how to bend Drupal farther than you ever thought possible.

Resources

Indianapolis Museum of Art: http://imamuseum.org/
IMA Drupal.org Showcase: http://drupal.org/node/188312
Art Institute of Chicago Collections: http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/
AIC Drupal.org Showcase: http://drupal.org/node/279485

Overview
In this session I will show you how to create a small business network on a multi-site Drupal installation. I will be using the small business network within my own community as an example.

In small-town Canada we have seen an increase in the "cottage industry" as people in their 50s cash out of urban centres and move to the country. These micro-enterprise businesses often have only the owner (and their partner) as staff. Although the businesses offer a huge range of services, they have one thing in common--very small budgets. Individually these businesses can rarely afford expert technical support, sophisticated Web sites and beautiful Web design--but with a Drupal-based business network, small businesses can now afford to look like pros on-line.

Agenda

• The Clients
  • developing your client roster (my network includes: farmers, a gourmet restaurant, a bookshop, a naturopathic doctor and a retreat centre)
  • creating self-sufficient clients: training materials; Drupal help nights (my group has nicknamed themselves "The Drupesters")
  • managing expectations (their budget and your time)
• The Business Model
  • you are now a business coach, congratulations!
  • how and how much to charge: tips on appropriate prices
  • reduce, reuse, recycle: you must become efficient
• Technical (Drupal) Information
  • Drupal modules your clients will want
  • using template designs
  • tips on creating and using a multi-site Drupal installation

Goals
By the end of this session I hope that Drupal enthusiasts will see how they can turn too-small-for-me clients into a potential source of income.

Resources
Please come with your stories about how you've used Drupal in your (small business) community.

Overview

Drupal is often compared with other CMS products, but the true power of the platform is realised when you compare with web application development frameworks. Drupal, as a set of APIs, is a viable choice as a framework for developing powerful web apps.

Agenda

* Web Framework features overview
* Drupal APIs and Modules for Web Application development
* Case studies: present two web apps developed using Drupal

Goals

Explore Drupal as a framework for Web Application development with a couple of Case Studies.

or How To Build a Stock Exchange in Three Months With Zero Knowledge, 9,000 Euros, and a Big Supply of Slovak Beer, errrr, Motivation.

Fusu is the Domain Stock Exchange that allows domainers to trade derivative interests in premium, high value domains. At launch, the value of domains on the Exchange exceeded $1.5 million USD. The initial prototype was built in three months by three developers that had basically zero knowledge of Drupal.

Agenda

* From zero to hero - prototype in 3 months
- Drupal as RAD framework
- Drupal as framework
- Closed beta with invites made easy
* Overview of a complex system:
Custom modules: financial backend, accounting, auctions, notifications, graphs, management
Modules used: invite (get users), affiliates (get paying users), dhtmlmenu (oh), cronplus (why not core?), buddylist (everything is social), cacheclear (ah the pain with cache), glossary (nice), faq (also nice), casetracker (for bugs)
* Challenges and lessons learned:
Deployment and development cycles
Scalability
Core hacking
Module hacking
Menu and caching
Drupal 6.x

Goals

We present how we built a relatively complex application in Drupal, describe the challenges we faced or are still struggling with. The goal is to show to the audience that using Drupal can be an efficient solution to create applications and not just content sites.