October NYC Drupal Meetup: Announcement

Hey everyone - I just wanted to say that I loved volunteering at DrupalCamp, but it looks like I won't be able to make the rest of the meetups this year (if they fall on Wednesday nights, that is). I'll have to see how my class schedule works out in the evenings next semester.

Have a great meetup!

Can anyone present on how to run a test? I have no idea and can't bring myself to read about this one online but would be happy to learn from a presentation.

I think it would be educational to go through some issue queues, led by someone code savvy, to see what it's like to come up with some solutions/patches. Then we'd be contributing back to the Drupal community at large as well. I'm probably not the only one who has taken some baby steps here but could really learn more from following someone as he/she looks at an error message and then figures out what code to look at and how to tell what that code is doing and what the problem might be, etc.

Also, while I understand now how to make a minimal module, I would like to have explained what are the parts of a more complex module like Views, that has not only .info and .module file but includes and plugins and so many other parts. What are they each for?!

Here's an idea for a topic I'd love to see:

Wrangling a Drupal Project...for Content Developers, Project Managers, and Entrepreneurs
So your company, non-profit, or startup has decided to build its website from Drupal (or transition an existing site to Drupal). What do you need to know in order to make the project run smoothly? Some topics to address:
* How do you go about hiring a Drupal consultant or company?
* How do you evaluate a firm or developer as far as various skills -- design, theming, module development, etc.?
* Should you hire one firm for design, and another for Drupal expertise (pros and cons)?
* What are some good questions to ask a developer/firm in order to assess their Drupal know-how?
* What are some of the things that sometimes get ignored (i.e., staff training in administering a site, testing, making sure your servers can handle things with Drupal)?

I think there are probably quite a few people among the group's 502 members who are content people for nonprofits/magazines/startups, etc., who would really benefit from this (yes, I'm one of them...I'm about to start looking for a firm to transition a content-heavy website to Drupal).

Allan

We already have a lot of material for one meetup but i would also like to suggest a discussion about drupal and security. why is it important to keep up to date with updates and write secure code whether you are a themer or a module developer.

If we dont have time during this month's meetup then we should definitely talk about it at the next month's meetup.

See you all soon :-D

Just wondering whether we've settled on an agenda. If the agenda is too full for the panel/topic I suggested (Wrangling a Drupal Project...for Content Developers, Project Managers, and Entrepreneurs), then maybe we could hold off on that for another month.

Ideally, for something like that, we would have a couple of people from different backgrounds:
* a one-person shop type (i.e., someone who builds/designs all on his/her own) for clients
* a representative of a multi-person company/collective that builds Drupal sites for startups, nonprofits, companies, etc.

Of course, if we can address this at this month's meeting, that'd be great.

Allan

--
http://www.allanhoffman.com

In addition to our discussion to SVN, can we also take it a step further (maybe we have to anyway) and discuss how you build a local development environment (do you need to do anything beyond the MAMP setup that was discussed at previous meetups?) and integrate that, through SVN, with a live/production environment? Regardless, looking forward to catching up with everyone this week.