Drupal Cape Town Community Meeting

I am really going to make it this time... promise...

Some ideas for possible topics to discuss...

Open Atrium and the context, spaces, features paradigm
Using CSS frameworks in Drupal - ninesixty, zen ninesixty, fluidgrid and fusion/skinr
Payment Gateways in SA - simplifying e-commerce with 2checkout hopefully

May be cool to get a Drupalcon reportback from anyone who went?

hmm, that sounds like a good idea. :)

i kind of like to use netcash (http://www.netcash.co.za & http://drupal.org/project/uc_netcash).

as i said we can split up into groups of people with similar interests and then we can chat about what we like. i like open atrium, it is a really cool product :).

Netcash does work well... but does it accept paypal as payment? I didn't think so :)
I have not used 2checkout for long but so far am pretty impressed with their service....
Ubercart also has 2checkout supported in core which is very helpful.

hmmm, youre right. only visa and mastercard. i have never used 2c, but i believe that they are quite good.

Was great meeting you all last night...

Thought I should share some of the links mentioned last night

http://openatrium.com/
Really beautiful organic groups based open source drupal intranet install profile recently released. I think this is going to be the basis of many great sites.

It uses three new drupal modules very well
http://drupal.org/project/context
http://drupal.org/project/spaces
http://drupal.org/project/features

To turn whole functional sets of features (which are like groups of pre configured modules, views, menu items and imagecache profiles) on and off per group.
havent really nailed the concepts exactly but open atrium is a good model of how awesome this compartmented functionality can be as you can turn blogs, galleries, calendars, to do tracker and shoutbox on and off for each group

I found a really cool example of a discography feature made by Dub Dubliner guy, You can download it and then just turn on the functionality within your site. http://drupal.org/node/454090
Tried it with a test install with the above modules and it was pretty easy to turn on and and automatically generate a pretty comprehensive artists/albums/ songs system. It would still need quite a bit of work but is a great place to start and definitely saves a few hours setting up basic functionality.

Fluid Grids & CSS Frameworks

These rock to speed up design and layout and some of the fluid guys are awesome...

Firstly here is the blog post on getting your panels to fit into your 960.gs framework ... should be similar for blueprint
http://blogthingee.com/blog/one-drupal-themers-path-defining-new-panel

http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/
This html layout is actually a prototyping tool that you can easily remove boxes and learn the 960 grid system css stuff with.
By removing and changing the existing box structure you can construct a variety of layouts very quickly and there are some rad basic jquery widgets to include to quickly build prototypes with.

http://www.fluidgrid.net/

fluid grid drupal theme
http://drupal.org/project/fluidgrid

960 Grid System - 16 and 12 columns
http://www.960.gs

Zen 960 Sub Theme
http://drupal.org/project/zen_ninesixty

Blueprint - 24 columns, vertical rhythm with typography
http://www.blueprintcss.org/
http://drupal.org/project/blueprint

There have also been some interesting developments with this new theming system called Fusion
http://drupal.org/project/fusion
http://drupal.org/project/skinr
http://drupal.org/project/acquia_prosper

And then finally we talked about 2checkout and what it means for South African e-commerce .... it also seems like they extended their free signup offer...
and they are promising Rand support within the next month...

http://www.2checkout.com/campaigns/sa/
http://imod.co.za/2009/09/02/2checkout-extends-free-sign-ups-for-south-a...

Happy Reading...

I actually demoed open atrium for the cape town guys before it had the name (it was still the internal code name '8trees') with aegir in april or so.