Is it possible to build something like Twitter in 5min in Drupal?
I did a presentation and ran a Drupal workshop in a university in Peru. For the workshop I asked for suggestions on what we could build in Drupal. My original idea was a Leave Application System. A test run with a few students demonstrated that this was incredibly boring. There was just too much config with the Workflow and Rules module. So thanks to Ryan Cross for the suggestion of building a Twitter clone. This was a hit!
Also great to have the opportunity to do a 45min Drupal presentation to about 200 Comp Sci students. In the finale of the presentation I attempted to build the simple Twitter clone in just 5 min with the stop-watch running. It was absolutely frantic! I used drush to quickly install modules and had a Selenium IDE script to create users. The students counted down the final 10 seconds and they loved it. In the end when the buzzer went off... I had failed. I did get very close and I took another minute to finish it off. Here’s what we built… http://dev-ucsm-twitter.pantheon.io/ (You need to be logged in to see how this works). The Microblog module is fantastic and provided most of the functionality. I used a Drupal theme called Tweme and confessed that the previous night it took more than an hour to do some of the CSS customizations to make it more Twitter like.
Here's the video - redone in English unfortunately without an audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcYk0Dzjn8
I’m hoping that the students took away that Drupal was not only a powerful tool used by many massive websites but also that Drupal is fun.
Thanks you to:
- Chris Shattuck of BuildAModule.com. We're going to use these videos in 2015 to train more students.
- Heather Graham for these Beginner Tutorials. We going to try and create more resources in Spanish
- David Chandler for the photos.
Any more great ideas for Drupal presentations? Any more cool Drupal apps we can build in 5 min?
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