Drupal Entities Unleashed -- Create your own information architecture with Drupal 7

One of the biggest changes at the architectural level of Drupal 7 is introduction of entities as an abstraction for content. Nodes has been inadequate in providing a complete solution for content management systems and Drupal 7 has found a way in the name of entities. The session will cover the following:

• What was missing in the previous Drupal architecture? How did entities come into picture?
• What are entities?
• How do you create an entity?
• How do you let your entity talk to other modules?
• Evaluate node vs custom entity implementation

In this session, a new entity will be created from scratch and the various options of an entity will be explored. We will go through all the major hooks related to an entity and in the end evaluate whether the effort to create a separate entity and not use nodes was worth it.