We held our Broward Drupal monthly meetup on Wednesday, October 9th from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.
In Person (Greater Fort Lauderdale, Broward County Florida):
Jay Epstein @jeppy64, Ben Groenevelt @dropfoundry, Michael Barton @TheBarton_ and me @hectoriribarne
This month Jay Epstein (@jeppy64) shared his ingenious way of building Drupal sites with entities. It turned out to be one of the best presentations ever given at Broward Drupal going all the way back to April 2010. It was so good that we plan of building on what was shared this month in the next few meetups. We even had one volunteer commit to creating a new site with what he learned and sharing it with the group at a future meetup.
Jay's methodology is so innovative that it could be used as a foundation for building Drupal sites more quickly and efficiently. It could rival many of the Drupal training programs already in existence ( I sure hope nobody in Brevard county is reading this because they may get jealous).
The base modules for this presentation are entity, entity reference and entity connect. Starting with the wireframe of the site, start creating the first entities as content types. Then, as the relationships in the wireframe dictate (e.g. many-to-one, one-to-one, etc.), add entity reference fields based on how the data will be displayed and create the corresponding view. This model for creating Drupal sites will improve performance and maintainability. It is also a very flexible model that is more easily adaptable to any future modifications.
We hope to absorb what Jay taught us so we can build better Drupal sites with his methodologies and share what we learn with the group. It is an exciting time for Broward Drupal.
We had no remote participants via Skype/Join.me and four in the meeting room.
To keep up with the Broward Drupal meetup group, go to our website: http://BrowardDrupal.org
You can also check us out on Twitter: @BrowardDrupal
--Hector