Plings Developer Day and Drupal Plings Module

What more can you ask for? With a bacon butty waiting and a coffee on arrival at the Plings developer day at thestudio Manchester we were certainly kicking off the on the right foot!

I'd heard about Plings via Steven Flower at http://www.substance.coop/ and it sounded interesting, my basic grasp of Plings is that it's location based activities information for young people fed by local authorities and organisations. If the kids are bored, they can check Plings and find out what's going on in their area. Sounds good eh?

There's an input API and an output API and the developer day was designed to bring together folks who are working with (and on) Plings in various ways to share and hack.

Steven gave a presentation of where Plings is at and outlined the challenges ahead. As the sheer amount of data flowing from Plings increases, (on the developer day there were over 10,000 Plings for the coming week on plings.net), the challenge for those working with Plings is to deliver what's relevant to the users, those authoring Plings can certainly help by tagging their Plings so that consumer services can provide their users with better filtering on interests and such.

I'd put together a Drupal Plings module and that's where the developer day came in handy for me, I wanted to see what other Drupalistas were doing with Plings and to hopefully work together on getting something ready for release.

On the Drupal table we had Luke from Ecobee, Simon from Colugo, Callum from Neontribe and Darran from Lancashire YPS.

So after a lot of discussion about best practices, coffee and good food we pushed some code up to http://github.com/matason/Plings where we'll work on getting a first release feature set implemented before releasing it on http://drupal.org

Get in touch with me if you have any ideas or want to dive into the development!