Web Applications – a Drupal Development Story

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I just completed a Drupal project that was more an application than it was a website. The program pretty much centered on a custom node type that we created, and instances of this type could be accessed by users depending on their roles. The main node type linked to other nodes and had fields that were user or taxonomy references. The purpose of the site, or in this case the application, was to integrate and manage tasks for the users, to make things easier for them to synchronize their schedules. These are some of the contributed modules that our team used:

Admin_menu – This was included to allow for easier navigation of the Drupal core menu items. I found it useful since I am, as of yet, memorizing the urls of all the Drupal components. It also gives the clients who are not regular Drupal users a simple way to navigate the admin menus. I recommend this module for the “mouse” type developers like me who prefer clicking as opposed to typing.

Location – Using this saved us a lot of time because the address fields that the client wanted, were all already built into this module.

Drupal and the Mobile World

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I am currently at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose where we are exploring how non profits can use mobile technologies for their causes. Some of these non profit mobile applications include:

1) Digital Democracy's Handheld Human Rights: a tool for allowing human rights activists to learn about human right abuses as they happen via SMS messaging.

2) The Extraordinaries: an IPhone based crowdsourcing tool for non profit initiatives. It allows people to help non profits with small tasks such as text translation when they are free using their IPhones.

3) SeeClickFix: a mobile application for users to report non emergency policy issues such as graffiti and use the power of the crowd to voice these issues to the appropriate government bodies.

I was looking at how Drupal can be used to power some of these applications. Even though Drupal is developed primarily as a web content management system, there has been a few recent changes that allow for Drupal to power mobile web sites.

Some information about implementing mobile Drupal web sites are: