Building the Coolest Three-Minute Drupal Demo
Acquia is starting to build Drupal demos and we’d like the community’s input on today's coolest Drupal capabilities to highlight. These demos will be targeted at people who have never heard about Drupal or maybe think it is "a blogging CMS." Right now we're focusing on building a very short demo in the 2-4 minute range that will be based around a story of a company wanting to create social buzz for the community of people who might use its products. We're looking for maximum impact in minimum time.
So, what are the hottest, most exciting things Drupal can to today based entirely on core+contrib features? Functionality we know we want to highlight includes:
- traditional content publishing, user-generated content
- social network with buddy lists / friends
- organic groups + blogging
- mashups: maps, feeds, other data sources
- slick display of all of the above with all kinds of dynamic update goodness
We’d like to hear from you. What’s the latest cutting-edge stuff you’re doing? What will make a two- to four-minute demo of Drupal blow the walls off the room?
Related Content
AcquiaBlog
2010 has been an inflection point for the Acquia partner program. We are doing more business than ever with partners, including case studies with Palantir.net, Blink Reaction, and IBM Global Services.
Bryan House
It is that phase of my life! I'm just turning 30 in a month, working with Drupal for 7 years and just had my third Acquia anniversary a week ago. Time to look back and evaluate how things went, all the good and bad things; even better if the wisdom can be shared with others. This was part of my thinking when I submitted the session titled "Come for the software, stay for the community" for Drupalcon Copenhagen.
Gábor Hojtsy
It sounded like a really simple request: "Is it easy to add a search filter for 'My posts'?". In other words, add a search result facet for posts by the current (logged in) user through the Apache Solr Search Integration module APIs?
But then the wheels start turning - we want not just one blind link, but a real facet link that tells us how many results we'll get. Also, if we are filtering by 'My posts' then we probably have an equal use case for the opposite filter 'Posts not by me'. So we really need a facet block with two links and facets counts.
Peter Wolanin
Comments
Harry Slaughter
Excellent idea! This is one
Excellent idea!
This is one of those 'this must have already been done' things :)
I think my favorite product demo is this one: http://dabbledb.com/explore/8minutedemo/
But that probably has more to do with the product than the demo itself.
Since your target audience is beginners or complete newcomers to Drupal, I'd try to address directly or indirectly some of the common complaints from folks new to Drupal. The most common things I hear are:
- Drupal sites all look the same
- Drupal is too hard to configure
- The learning curve is too steep
- It is too hard to install
I really don't agree with any of these things, but I still don't know how to explain to people why they are not true :)
I think one of the coolest
I think one of the coolest and most powerful and empowering capabilities is that company-generated content, user-generated content, and content from RSS feeds can be mashed up in as many ways as you can imagine with Views and Queues and then poured into whatever columns, rows, or tabs you want on whatever pages you want with Panels 2, resulting very quickly in content-filled sites that could resemble a newspaper or fastcompany or ... you name it.
Our site is still kind of in its infancy but is an evolving example of that. Can't wait for Views 2 and Panels 2 for Drupal 6 to come out and we'll really have some fun.
Instead of what to show, I'd
Instead of what to show, I'd rather think about how to show it. As it is quite easy to address the people who already have experience with other CMSes, I understand you are rather targeting at less technical people. So a lot depends of a smooth way to pretend everything is as easy as slicing bread (well, even there are some dangers ;))
That for, maybe learning from the best could help. Well, NOT Stephen Jobs ;) http://youtube.com/watch?v=xgZKjJt-TkU
Two of my favourites are: one, surely the Dabbledb one already mentioned, and two, the plone TinyMCE thing: Editing with Plone
Nice music, a pleasant voice, a quiet yet steady pace... Counts more than content. (IMHO from users eyes)
as a new comer who looked at
as a new comer who looked at drupal 4 and walked, who is looking at drupal 6 now and still really wondering, I would say the most important thing to add, which is what I still am asking...
what and how...
what can I do and how...
another comment said "mashed up in as many ways as you can imagine with Views and Queues and then poured into whatever columns, rows, or tabs you want on whatever pages you want with Panels 2"
I could read through the drupal site for weeks and never get to that, and even if I did there would be 10+ mods that did the same thing and I would have no clue which one to pic or how well, fast and effectively it worked. On top of that even if I knew what I was actually looking for from an aspect of a mod and found one of the mods that would do it, setting it up to do it could be a nightmare... as a developer, I have my site flowed out, I have done some light prototyping and I know how to accomplish code wise what I want to do, with drupal even after reading 2 books and dozens of pages on the site I still don't have a real clue as to what it can do and how.