DrupalCamp day 2

Day 2 at Drupalcamp UK was as packed with goodness as the first day, here's some of the highlights:

Integration with 3rd Party Applications

In this excellent session given by Adam Evans common techniques and pitfalls for integrating applications with Drupal were covered. There were some really good tips, including using Solr to search external data held in a e-commerce system and using the Drupal Apache Solr module to pull that data into a Drupal page.

Form API

This session at Drupalcamp UK was given by our very own computermind: Steven Jones. He took a quick poll, and people wanted him to speak on using hook_form_alter. In a major blunder he tried to alter the node form. It turned out that you can't alter some bits of it at the module level, because of special handling. Still, the principles were covered!

Migrating data with Table Wizard and Migrate

Robert Douglass gave a brilliant session where he showed off the Table Wizard module, which allows you to expose ANY database table to views. In this presentation the tables were Joomla user and content tables. He then went on use the Migrate module to import the data coming from views on those tables into the Drupal equivalents, i.e. Robert imported Joomla users, content and permissions right into Drupal!

Migrate needs some UI polishing, and there are still some kinks to work out, but this certainly looks like a very powerful and flexible to import all kinds of data.

Help Inject

Robert presented to us again and demoed his module: Help Inject. This allows you to very quickly add inline help: it gives you little 'plus' buttons on every page and form element, to which you can attach some popup help text. The texts are standard book pages, and can include images, videos, whatever! Help inject will then export all the help for you into flat, advanced help compatible, HTML files. It even exports the images and videos into the right places! Your help then lives as a standalone module that you can package up and distribute with your modules. Genius.

Views Handlers

Our computermind Steven Jones presented to Drupalcamp UK again, showing how to expose your database tables to views, and the significance of views handlers in that process. He then went on to demo a fairly complicated handler, and outlined the general process of building your own. Pretty heavy developer stuff here!

Wrap up

Drupalcamp was awesome, and there were some really great ideas being presented. We can't wait for the next one, or DrupalCon UK!