Integrating Drupal and Filemaker

(Pardon the delay. I was busy out of town.)

This is similar to my first Drupal project: client had an existing Filemaker database and wanted all the benies of Drupal. I spoke with one fellow in particular that was very confident of making FM a back end to Drupal, but the more I looked into it, the less sense it made to me.

I've been working my client's project into a pure Drupal solution and it makes much more sense now. That being said, there were areas that needed reworking/reconsideration:

1) data storage: FM has a couple snazzy features in its database engine including "multiple values" and their own brand of relations. While they can be translated to Drupal in many cases, there are some peculiar situations when the FM features are worked with heavily.

2) UI and process flow: It's obvious to me that a web-based app has a different flow than a client-end app like FM. While these can also be translated, the FM processes feel clunky and foreign when applied to a web UI.

3) Leveraging core Drupal: the Taxonomy facility was a far better tool than the custom facility built into my client's FM database. Translating that was a Good Thing as I could leverage Drupal much more easily.

To summarize, unless there's strong reason to stick with Filemaker, I'd rewrite in Drupal. The inevitable compromises and workarounds would be more costly at some point.

As far as your second question, I imagine the module suggestions to be more based on the functionality that you're looking for rather than anything having to do with Filemaker specifically.

All the best! Keep the dialog going if you like.