March 2010 Southern Colorado Drupal Meeting

As we had a number of folks new to Drupal in our February meeting, everyone who had Drupal experience contributed to giving an overview of Drupal. Is it a CMS or a development platform? How is Drupal organized between core, modules, the theme layer, custom modules, etc? An overview of national, regional and local Drupal sites and projects.

As always, this discussion served to introduce one another, our specialties and ways we could promote everyone's businesses!

Mike Potter then gave a great presentation on building a theme from scratch and then using Zen to develop a new theme. Mike's presentation was great for non-coding developers and coders who have no design skills.

Bryan Jones won a free copy of the O'Reilly book, Using Drupal. Attendees of our March meeting will be eligible to win our last complimentary copy of Using Drupal! Thanks O'Reilly!

March Meeting. Our main event at our March meeting will be demonstrations and discussions of all of our favorite modules. One of the many advantages of Drupal is the huge variety of modules you can use to add functionality to your web site. However, not all modules are created equal. Learn about real life experiences in which modules are absolutely the "must have's".

Matt Kleve (vordude on drupal.org) kindly created a wiki of our favorite modules at http://groups.drupal.org/node/48948. Jump up there and contribute your favorite modules and we will demo, discuss, compare and contrast modules and their capabilities.

Be sure to consider attending upcoming national and regional Drupal events. DrupalCon 2010 in San Francisco promises to be an amazingly exhilarating event. DrupalCamp Colorado has been an amazing regional event in Denver for the last number of summers. Not everyone can get to San Francisco, so we might brainstorm on how to best share this information among the entire group.

As always, be sure to bring your Drupal questions and problems to the group.

Many thanks to our host, the East Library in Colorado Springs. We are normally in the large conference room; take a hard left when you enter the building. Our regular meetings are on the first Thursday of the month. We’ll start socializing at 6:30, and the actual event will begin at 7:00. Our host locks up at 9, so we’ll have to be out by then.
Sign up here or go to our meetup.com page.

We are continuing our ongoing effort to invite local college students and their instructors to our next meeting. As I have a number of Colorado Tech students and recent alums working with me, I will be shortly posting a link to a pdf here that you, too, can distribute to the southern Colorado community.