The Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association is a twenty-five-year-old academic organization, whose primary activity is a yearly conference with about 450 participants. Until 2011 it had an old, completely static website, and all the conference-related procedures were managed manually.

In 2012 I started working with MAPACA on a new site built on Drupal 7, which would have the following goals:

- provide information on the organization, its structure, and its history (late spring 2012)
- allow people to submit abstracts to present at the conference (spring 2013)
- allow the chairs of the various areas of the conference to approve or reject submissions, and to build panels (summer 2012)
- allow conference managers to schedule sessions (fall 2012)
- automatically create an online conference schedule (fall 2012)
- manage conference registration and the sale of membership fees (summer 2012)

The initial project has been completed with a combination of contrib and custom modules. In particular, the whole conference-management system was coded specifically for this project, not because there weren't enough contrib modules that, in the right combinations, could handle the task, but because I wanted as little overhead as possible, preferring to limit the active modules strictly to the functionality required by the organization's existing procedures.

The main point I would like to convey in my session is that you don't need an extensive team to carry out a fairly large and ambitious project such as this one. In fact, MAPACA's website was built, designed and developed by a single person.

I will outline how different types of modules have been used and integrated into the system:

- contrib modules used as is
- contrib modules that required modifications (particularly User Merge, which I've almost completely redeveloped into what is now the 7.x-2.x branch on drupal.org)
- custom modules of general use (some of which I've contributed to drupal.org)
- specific custom modules.

This aims to be a demonstration of the power of Drupal, which lies not only in the wide range of contrib modules available, but also (and, I would say, above all), in its flexibility as a framework.