The Singapore Drupal Meetup Group - April edition - Drupal and Mobile Development
About how to get data out of CMSes and into apps.
In short: Use Drupal 7 RESTFUL api.
Hi Guys,Thanks for coming for the meetup today. For all you newbies here, today is my first time here too! So a bit about my self first. I am most visible at the Co-Founder of 2359 Media which is a leading mobile consultancy in Asia. Our clients are mainly brands and content publishers who want to have their presence on the mobile phones of the customers. so far, They have engaged us to make about 50 iPhone/Android Apps aI also code mainly in Obj-C which is a mobile development platform for iPhone which is totally way different from DruaplAs a web developer, I code in exclusively in RoR with my only painful PHP experience limited to 1 module in NUS which I did a Facebook application. So again, I won’t be able to answer your question of how to modify drupal or build drupal modulesI use Wordpress,notdrupal, as the CMS for my personal website www.zhouwenhan.com therefore I haven’t even seen how the administrator page of drupal looks like.In short I am totally unqualified for this talk. (haha)Now that I have set the bar so low and I hope Sven doesn’t kick me out of the meetup group after this, here is how I think I would be able to contribute
In the 2 years we have been around, we have built quite a few apps and the initial apps were mostly built to work with a CMS backend. Now the CMS that we built on was called Radiant and it is a open source RoR CMS with the concept of Pages, Layouts, Snippets and extensions. So what I will share with you is how we architected our CMS to work with our apps and some key lessons that we learned along the way.
Demo of iMerlionThis is a typical app that I built that interfaced with a CMS backend. I will first go through the simple functionality of the app and then the backend and how it all works together. Tab 1 is a RSS ReaderTab 3 is a simple Map of stores from a Google Map APITab 4 is a info page which is HTML and is stored locallyTab 2 is more the of CMS Part where there is a list of categories then a list of apps and their details when you enter. This is a very familiar tree based structure which comes in most CMS. So we basically replicated the tree based structure in the CMS. Show CMS. Show Layout
So that is how we basically connected the iPhone with the CMS. The iPhone has some screen templates that display data in the correct places according to what is in the XML feed. The XML feed generally follows a restful interface. Of course this XML can also be JSON/RSS and in some causes, it can be pure HTML and the phone just opens the browser. Some of you might question if why we even need an app in this case, since a app like this could be coded in HTML/CSS. You are right and this is where one has to be clear which functions you can outsource to the mobile client and which you want to keep to a server function.
Examples of Mobile SiteWork for inSing.comPossible to have touch based events. You just need to have coded it. Most CMS do not have touch based Widgets or modules yet. Need to rework the navigation of your siteLess Smooth navigation as layout has to be downloaded and renderFaster speed of deployment and developmentYou can then wrap it up as an app and upload to app store. Then take advantagge of app specific features like push notifications.
MobDis DemoOther than building apps for other companies, we also have our own product called MobDis. MobDis is a platform to create and serve rich media advertisements for mobile campaigns. Based on a graphical interface and customizable widgets, MobDis enables agencies and designers to rapidly create a rich media banner unit and accompanying mobile landing site with no coding required. Our main customers are agencies, their clients and media companies with smartphone/tablet apps. Right now each page is static in MobDis and something I want to get out of this is to see how MobDis can be hooked up to CMSes t provide the designer with the ability to have dynamic content. So I will do a short demo and I hope anyone with an idea how of you would like to inout dynamic content to please speak your mind.
Co2 featured sitesMini App- http://creative.mobdis.me/projects/962About Me - http://creative.mobdis.me/projects/985#navigation
Video 1 of building a site -
Live Demo of v2Flexible events & effects that allows you to start animations and mobile specific actions when a user does a screen swipe or enters a pageAssets & Objects & Widgets
Questions: How would you like to Hook in drupal? What would a dynamic system within MobDis look like? HTC Mobile Ad