June SFDUG Round-up

UPDATE: Now contains link to Matt's screencast.
[I'm posting this as a new topic, since the contents may be of interest for people who did not or could not make it.]

Thanks to the folks who showed up last Monday for the June SF Drupal User's Group meeting at PariSoMa. Twelve in all, dealing with the heat to attend ever-informative and entertaining Matt Cheney talk about Swish-E (link to screencast below) Some of the topics we covered:

Swish-E Indexer: Lots of great information in the presentation Screencast is here. Swish-E's great functionality is to provide smart rankings, but it turns out you can use the document translation libraries without the Swish-E engine to similar effect without rankings (watch the screencast for more info on that).

Other modules that support better search functionality were mentioned, including:

• Views Fast Search - This will speed up your views searching considerably
• Faceted Search - allows you to present more relevant data based on an initial search (and it looks like a lot of other stuff - haven't checked it out)
• Search plug-ins for Solr / Xapian / Windows Live Search / Google CSE

We also talked a bit about CSS, and the consensus was ... Zen Theme! We talked a bit about Foundation, but no one had used it; Blueprint was recommended by Chris, and Roople by Celine (and myself).

Two admin menus that received the popular vote were Admin Menu and SimpleMenu. Someone also mentioned Teleport, which allows you the Mac-Quicksilver ability to type the first few letters of an admin menu, and jump to that menu... in your browser... Gotta check it out.

Finally, a concession to IE - IE Web Developer Toolbar, the next best thing to getting Firebug on IE. If you need to check out your designs, you can try http://BrowserShots.org/ (free or paid), or http://BrowserCam.com. But most developers preferred to run an instance of IE on a virtual machine (or find an unlucky friend), and check it out live.

Or, just install Browser Support Module, so your web site flashes a custom message telling your users not to use IE....

Thanks again to all who came. Now if you can help me - I have a note that says "Drupal for Firebug (next month)" - I know I asked people for presentation ideas, but I have no idea what this note means. :-)

(We've got Chris and Dave lined up for future presentations, when their projects are ready...)