UPDATE: Check out our Mediacurrent blog post on this topic, covering the first half of this session proposal.

LOTS of non-technical folks love to use FileMaker; it's a cheap and intuitive alternative to more expensive visual database solutions, like Microsoft Access. It's the #1 best-selling standalone database for both Macintosh and Windows and has won dozens of awards in the industry.

At Mediacurrent, we recently integrated a client's existing FileMaker database with a freshly-launched Drupal 7 website, and, since not many people have attempted this before, we would like to share our solution with the community. You need this presentation if:

• You use FileMaker and are sick of exporting/importing CSV files.
• You have diehard FileMaker fanboys (and fangirls!) in your organization.
• Your organization uses both Drupal and FileMaker to implement its business processes, and you find yourself saying, "Gee whiz, it sure would be nice if they could talk!"

In the presentation, we will provide a high-level overview of our solution, and we will also share more detailed implementation notes in supporting documents. A brief synopsis:

• Drupal-->Filemaker: using the WSClient and Rules modules to push data to RESTfm, a REST server for FileMaker.
• Filemaker-->Drupal: using the Troi URL plugin to send REST requests from FileMaker to Drupal Services.
• Drupal<--Filemaker: pulling data into Drupal via a LIST response from RESTfm.

Note: Although our initial proposal included significant development in FileMaker scripting, we achieved our ultimate solution with minimal FileMaker configuration and clean, elegant PHP code in a custom Drupal module.

For a review of the first half of this presentation, head over to this post on the Mediacurrent Blog.