Starting life as a community messageboard, Drupal has grown to become a powerful and flexible application open source framework for creating all types of websites. It is used for community building and social networking, e-commerce and brochure-ware sites, intranets and portals.

Many large and popular websites are built on Drupal, including http://www.mtv.co.uk, http://www.greenpeace.co.uk, http://universalmusic.com/ and http://www.fastcompany.com/

One of Drupal’s key strengths is its active developer community, which is constantly seeking ways to improve the project. The core of Drupal 7 is currently in development and, beside aiming to improve the interface for end users, the project is dropping support for PHP 4 and re-implementing its database abstraction layer.

Drupal is reputed to have a steep learning curve, but in this session we aim to show developers how straight forward customisation of Drupal can be and how it can greatly speed up development.

We will introduce you to Drupal’s theme system, which allows you to modify almost all of Drupal’s output so that the HTML it outputs is the HTML that you, the developer, want.

We will start with a static HTML page and take you through the steps to convert it to a Drupal theme, showing you on the way the functionality you get for free: content management, a comprehensive user system, caching, search, form validation and more.

In fact, with hundreds of contributed modules available, which extend Drupal’s core functionality in any way imaginable, we will be merely touching upon what Drupal has to offer!