Beyond Content Management: Drupal as a foundation for Web Apps

This session is a retrospective of a recently completed project where we converted an old Drual 6 site with a FileMaker back-end to a shiny new D7 site with full e-commerce capabilties and all of the functionality they needed. The project was completed in 2 phases:

• The first phase focused on rebuilding the site in Drupal 7 and doing some integration with the back-end database while giving the site a complete visual overhaul. 
• The second phase was focused on removing the FileMaker back-end, including migrating all existing data and automating as much of the administrative tasks as possible.

The session will be of interest to beginners as well as advanced attendees. There are some sophisticated custom modules that do some of the heavy lifting and fancier functionality but also some more fundamental things to learn about structuring content types and their relationships, harnessing the relationships to build highly functional views, as well as some custom theming tricks.