Phase2 ran a hackathon yesterday at DrupalCon Amsterdam to encourage Drupal app and distribution development.  

Although Drupal distributions can offer a lot of value, one of the Drupal project's biggest challenges right now is awareness of its capabilities and value.

This competition was setup to provide an incentive to get developers working on a distribution for Drupal or an app for Panopoly or Open Atrium.

Why do we need distributions?

Drupal is aimed at a wide audience and needs configuration after installation to meet users' specific needs. Distributions help non-technical people build websites faster. 

The lowdown

A distribution is a package which includes both Drupal Core and a collection of other modules, libraries, themes and configuration scripts. Together these provide a fully working site configured for a very specific use case.

A great example of a distribution is Commerce Kickstart which provides a fully fledged off-the-shelf eCommerce website, something which would take some time to configure if you started with Drupal alone.

Drupal apps provide small bundles of functionality which can be added via a point and click method to an existing site.  So, if you want to add an image gallery to your site then installing the image gallery app would create the necessary content types and install the right modules to make this happen.

Getting started

I heard about the Drupal distribution hackathon competition at DrupalCon Amsterdam and got the details from the helpful people at Phase2. I headed there on my own and was welcomed into a team of three other animated developers where we started discussing ideas.  

The idea

Two of the other developers had an interesting idea about building a Drupal distribution for non-technical people which would help them build a website to deliver presentations online.

We decided to have a go at building this in Drupal 8 because it’s exciting to use a new and evolving platform. 

Introducing Promokit...

In seven short hours, we built a themed installation profile which configured Drupal with minimal effort from the end user. Nifty.

We called our idea PromoKit. It includes a first-time run wizard which helps you build your first presentation quickly and doesn't assume you know how to use Drupal.

We also added some additional niceties, such as an editing dashboard to manage and order the presentation’s slides.  

When you access the site as an anonymous user, you are shown slide 1 of the presentation which displays to full screen. You can also page through the slides using the forward and back keys.

The hack

We had a lot of fun diving deep into the Drupal 8 eco-system to understand how to build modules, themes and installation profiles. Although the finished product needs some more polish, we achieved much of our original ambition and were able to add some visual improvements, such as theming the Drupal 8 installation wizard.

Around 10pm, each team delivered a short presentation on their work. We demonstrated how Promokit used Drupal distributions to make it really easy for end users to achieve their goals. We were overjoyed when our team was awarded first prize by Phase2's CTO Frank Febbraro.

Thank you Phase2

Huge thanks to Phase2 for organising the competition and putting on the food and drink to keep us going.  Also, well done to all the other teams. I hope everyone had a great time like I did!