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. Thus, one had to use nodes in order to fully make use of Drupal's power and flexibility. However, with Drupal 7 more and more modules start building upon entities instead, so the modules are applicable to all of Drupal's entities! Thankfully, the entity API allows exposing any data as "entities" what makes the data accessible by all those modules! Want to use Views to list remote data? Use Rules for automation? Token replacements? Or build faceted searches with the Search API? Start drupalizing your data! Rough outline: 1. Overview: Entities in core and the contrib entity API module 2. Entity property metadata: What is it good for? 3. How to provide a new entity type stored in Drupal's database 4. Integrating remote data as entities 5. Drupalizing data: An example use case // demo In the end I'll elaborate on missing bits and possible further use cases. Also, we'll have a short look at what Drupal 8 entity API developments are going to bring to us.

Questions answered by this session:
What are entities? And how does the entity API module relate to the core entity API?
What's necessary to provide a new entity type?
What's that entity property metadata and what is it good for?
How can one use entities to integrate and drupalize data from remote systems?
What can I do with "drupalized data"?