Sometimes I am amazed at the sheer power of Drupal. Last night was one of those times.
I had an idea awhile back to create an AllTop clone for Twitter (basically, the top people to follow for particular topics loaded in typical AllTop formatting). I also wanted an area where the sidebar would load in tweets every 5 seconds or so from these people in real time. There were requirements to manage all this and so forth as well.
I spec'd it out and tried to get it created on the cheap in India. They came back with 30 man days. Even at $17 dollars an hour this worked out to approx 4 grand. This was just a silly idea I had and wanted to test out and didn't want to shell out 4K (add to that the fact that I didn't perceive it would take 30 man days -- after all, I still remember how to hack PHP code).
The last two nights after work, I decided to see if I could build this thing in Drupal. I did. In 6 hours (4 hours one night, 2 hours the other).
Let's break down the math: 30 man days with India. 6 hours with Drupal.
I used Twitter module, CCK and Views + one custom module with 20 lines of code. It does everything I wanted it to. It rocks. It's fun and I can look at a variety of topics without having to subscribe to all of them.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
