Western Mass Drupal Meetup - August 5, 2008 @ 6:00 pm
The next Western Mass Drupal Meetup will be on Tuesday, August 5.
Great meeting last night, including Walter's presentation on ECommerce and Drupal (Ubercart recommended) and David's presentation on Pubcookie. Thanks again to David Hamilton for hosting the meeting.
Location: Amherst College campus, Webster 102 (see comment from David below for more detail.)
Please suggest agenda items for the next meeting by posting comments below.
Check back here later for updates.
AGENDA (in process):
- Overview access control modules - which to use when? - General Discussion
- A look at template files - Rick Hood
- What IDE do you use and why? Textmate, BBEdit, Dreamweaver, etc... - General Discussion
- SEO and Drupal - Josh Cohen
UPDATE (8/6/08): See read more link below for meeting notes.
Great meeting. A little light on attendance but I realize that may be my fault as I should send out a reminder. Will do next time.
Some brief notes on things discussed:
Access Control Modules:
http://drupal.org/project/private - very basic per-node access control.
http://drupal.org/project/content_access - many more options - perhaps the best one.
http://drupal.org/project/og - Organic Groups has its own access control.
Be careful as generally cannot use more than one access control module at same time - conflicts.
Template Files:
http://drupal.org/theme-guide/5 - for Drupal 5
http://drupal.org/phptemplate - all about PHPTemplate theme engine
http://drupal.org/node/104316 - different page templates by path
http://drupal.org/theme-guide - for Drupal 6
All of above is in the handbook:
http://drupal.org/handbooks
IDEs
Eclipse, Dreamweaver and various text editors all mentioned.
During discussion, topic of version control came up: Subversion, CVS, etc. Good topic for nest meeting.
SEO and Drupal
Listen to this Podcast:
http://www.volacci.com/category/sprydev-seo-podcast
especially episode #6.
Tells you almost everything you need to know.
Note: David said he had a problem where allowing free-tagging really messed up Google search results, as Google really grabbed onto the tags and showed results it really shouldn't (because of user created free tagging). So he disabled free tagging.
Other ideas for next meeting:
- Innovative ways of using CCK and Views.
- Intro to Drupal 6
Ical feed
PHP IDE thread
Just as a note, this is the thread I mentioned at the last meeting about various PHP IDEs. Lots of interesting links in there:
http://forum.kohanaphp.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=186
As Rick said, all of this is probably overkill if you're not actually making your own modules and such.
BTW, for those that like TextMate on OSX (more of a text editor than IDE and useful for many purposes), there's a semi-clone called E-TextEditor on the PC:
http://www.e-texteditor.com/
vim
Wish I could go, but I'm leaving before the meeting... (EDIT: I postponed my trip so I'll be there.)
It's not a full IDE, but Vim is great.
Using Vim with Drupal
Takes time to figure vim out, but it's worth it:
Vim tutorials
Meeting to be held in Webster 102 again
Hi folks,
I just reserved the room now, so we're all set again for the same location in August. I'll post a drupal icon on the front door of Webster to help folks identify the building. Unfortunately, Webster has no sign identifying it - look for the building with "Geology" above the door and a series of names carved in the stone band in between the first and second floors. As with last time, there's wifi available for guests, a projector, and workstations, along with ample seating. Here's a google map view of the college campus, and here's a screencap with Webster, the Lord Jeff, and the campus loop map highlighted.
meetup
I just saw the message about next month's meeting. I thought the August meeting was tonight (Wed). I had the wrong date on my calendar. I was going to talk about some things not mentioned on the page below, but there are some basic Drupal SEO tips here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/11304
Sorry about missing it. I'll turn my presentation tips into a blog post and post a message here when it's done.