Building a Financial Web Application Using Drupal

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.