Drupal only for websites?

By Shalimar on 4 Nov 2015 at 15:28 UTC

The title pretty much says it all.
Drupal looks like it has a lot of potential for other environments as well.

Comments

Drupal could serve as the

Sam Moore

he/him

Sandy Hook, CT

commented 4 November 2015 at 16:12

Drupal could serve as the back end for any number of application types.
Dries wrote some observations about this here:
http://buytaert.net/the-future-of-decoupled-drupal

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I guess I am too new to

Shalimar commented 7 November 2015 at 04:48

I guess I am too new to Drupal to have taken much away from that link.
It still seemed centered around a web page, but I guess that is just a convenient interface...
Seems like it would be ripe for a browser based app, but again, still keeping to the webpage format.
Nothing wrong with that I suppose, just seemed odd.

Consider a Javascript

Sam Moore

he/him

Sandy Hook, CT

commented 7 November 2015 at 17:02

Consider a Javascript framework-based app, one built in, say, Angular, with Drupal as the data store, serving JSON packets to the Angular app. That's the kind of thinking the article was addressing, and seemed to be where you were going with the original post.

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bander2 commented 8 November 2015 at 14:13

What do you mean by "webpage format"?

Do you have an example of what you would like to build?

- Brendan

I don't have any solid ideas

Shalimar commented 10 November 2015 at 07:00

I don't have any solid ideas just yet, especially as far as the end user GUI will appear.
A couple of random ideas: I was thinking about...
...having a database of image files that could be compressed for inventory purposes.
...having a database of GPS points and overlay a travel line on google maps, not unlike some of those Family Circus cartoon strips.
...a widget to display statistical data on the desktop or on a smart device.
...making a complicated checklist for gathering statistical data in a controlled environment.
...something that could make a comparative analysis of database entries.
...a better telnet style client that would span OSes.
...a universal smart device controller.

Well you could build the

Sam Moore

he/him

Sandy Hook, CT

commented 10 November 2015 at 14:40

Well you could build the front end in anything you like and use Drupal to serve data to it, as in the Angular example mentioned above.
Drupal modules - contrib or custom - could do a lot of what you've mentioned in your list, in concert with ImageMagick or ffmpeg (for image and video processing), Leaflet or OpenLayers (for mapping), etc.
Of course when you take the front end out of Drupal you lose things like Form API, so you wind up having to do validation and user-input scrubbing yourself (or with another framework).

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bander2 commented 10 November 2015 at 15:28

Drupal might be right for some of these and not others. Drupal has a great permission system, content model, block system, etc. It also has a good API so you can code your own functionality, which means you can do anything you can do with PHP. But the less you take advantage of Drupal benefits the less Drupal makes sense. Because, while the API is good (and probably the best of any CMS) it is not as good as using a framework (RoR, Django, Symfony) for lots of programming.

Each project has to be evaluated individually. Drupal is a great tool to have in the toolkit, but it's not the only one.

- Brendan