Drupal 7 introduces entities, the foundational concept behind nodes, comments, users, terms, vocabularies and files. This session will introduce Drupal's entity API and depict how it can be leveraged to drupalize any data!

Historically, Drupal and all its modules primary dealt with nodes. But those days are over. Since Drupal 7 most modules work with entities - so let's let them work with your data too and learn how to expose it as entities!

Outline:
We'll start with a general introduction to the entity API in Drupal7 (both, core and the contrib module) and learn how to generally work with entities and how to leverage the system best to provide a new entity type and to easily integrate it with Drupal and important contribs like Views, Panels, the Search API or Rules.

Based on that we'll explore how the same system can be used to seamlessly integrate data of non-SQL data stores or any remote system via web services. Learn about the advantages of exposing remote data as entities - like all the great module integration (including Views!) and what can be more tricky to achieve.

Last, we'll have a short look at what Drupal 8 entity API developments are going to bring us.

Note:
This session will be a refreshed and improved version from the one given in Denver, see http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/drupalize-your-data-use-en....