module development

My session at next week's Drupal conference has been confirmed. I will be presenting a few case studies from recent Drupal developments, and talking about Drupal APIs and Drupal as a Web Development Framework. Here's the abstract:

Drupal is often compared with other CMS products, but the true power of the platform is in it's flexibility and extensibility. Drupal, as a set of APIs, is a viable choice as a framework for developing powerful web apps. This session will demonstrate the use of Drupal APIs and Modules for web application development by means of a couple of case studies. Along the way we'll touch on comparisons with other frameworks from a developer perspective, and requirements for enterprise from a business perspective.

See you in Szeged!

Most of my work to date has been Drupal 5, but a new project I am involved in has required the switch to Drupal 6. On the whole I couldn't be happier - D6 is really nice in so many areas, and the switch has been pretty painless. Except - I'm now looking at Drupal installation profiles.

A couple of gotchas that I wasn't expecting...

The Drupal for Developers event was great fun this week. I did a 15 min presentation on Programmatically Creating Drupal Nodes. The slides from this presentation will be going up on the Drupal UK site in the near future, but you can get a preview of the presentation below.

I will be speaking at the next Drupal UK event, which is being held at The Economist offices in London next Wednesday, 30th July.

My presentation is going to be about programmatically creating content (nodes) including CCK fields, attachments, and images. I will be presenting a case study from recent development that automatically creates content from iTunes Producer packages.

Places are limited but you can find more information and signup here:
http://drupal.org.uk/event/drupal-developers/04-jul-2008

Also, check out the other upcoming Drupal UK events, I will also be presenting at the Enterprise event.

You can use any database table to validate users for your Drupal site. In this case I'm validating users against a database of clients. This client database is maintained outside of Drupal. It's a simple two step process, and just needs a couple of PHP functions in a custom module: