March meetup (and DrupalCamp discussion)

Cheers Joe - see you there!

I've been thinking about Joe's suggestion at the last meetup that we could discuss things that people may need help with at the Drupal meetups.

For instance, I'm building a messaging system that is hopefully pretty flexible so that (using D7 Rules, flags, organic groups and VBO) members of a group can send messages either to the whole group or a subset of that group. I can elaborate later if anyone is interested. It would be great if we could discuss the best "best" approach, thinking about what modules are good or bad. Would you use PrivateMsg or Notifications & Subscriptions for example. Is it scaleable?

Perhaps we could start organising some meetups (perhaps additional ones) where people interested in a piece of functionality could come along and we could pool our ideas and efforts to provide a solution or develop a feature that we could all take away.

If so does anyone have any proposals for features we could jointly develop?

that does sound ideal. I'm the only Drupal developer in my current company, and in fact, was the one who recommended it as a CMS for a client. Everyone is now slowly getting on board, and have been really impressed with it as a platform, but it would be really handy to both big it up with fellow users (and reassure myself), as well as maybe vent a bit of steam and/or get some input and advice from more experienced developers!

The current project I'm working on is a Social/Community website with heavy ties to the Salesforce.com CRM, and is actually my first in Drupal 7 (though I spent 3 hours last night trying to maintain an old D6 site I run for a friend, and good grief did it make me thankful for the progress!).

So besides the obvious pseudo-core modules such as Views, Date and Wysiwyg, I have been dealing heavily with the Salesforce Suite module and API, which has proven interesting, and also with social integration (FB Oauth, Tweet etc.) and gamification techniques (User points, Achievements).

I would love to pick someones brains regarding web services, as I eventually had to give up trying to implement an XMLRPC or REST service via either the "Services" or "Web Service" modules, which was a mega shame, and I'd also be on board for developing a common project with others if an idea presented itself.

Firstly, I'm not a Drupal developer - tried it many years ago - think I got caught in a transitional period between v4 and v5, then got scared off.

These days I am heavily involved in Umbraco CMS development, along with being an Umbraco MVP, I also run the Bristol user-group (umBristol).

Recently I found that I'm almost living/developing in a silo - so focused on Umbraco that I might be missing out on other technologies.
So in an effort to do this... I'd like to come along, have a beer, chat tech/CMS, etc.

Look forward to meeting you all.

Cheers,
- Lee

Still at the Elephant?

Is it within a room at the Elephant or something, or where about will everyone be?

Sorry I'm missing this one, seems to be a lot of important stuff being discussed (assuming all goes to plan)!

Please let me know what comes out of it.

nothing important Chris, what were you expecting? ;-)

I was hoping Mr Dixon and his can-do attitude would aid us in planning a separate more formal event (we have been all talk, to date) but unfortunately we didn't see him last night.

Despite that it was a record turn out with loads of new faces. One person even through word of mouth as opposed to the Drupal group, which was nice!

If anyone had a question answered or learnt anything interesting - maybe they'd like to post it up here? (Although I know most of the conversations were a bit abstract and perhaps hard to write up)

unfortunately I couldn't make it again last night .. antenatal classes trumps drupal ;) .. but I'll be there for the next one.

I'll be happy to help out with a formal event if you need it. Can also give a few pointers from what I learnt from organising the last one :p

Cheers, Leroy