Spokane Daytime Drupal Group - Oct 18 - Argonne Library

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jhodgdon's picture
Start: 
2018-10-18 10:00 - 12:00 America/Los_Angeles
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

We hope you can join us for the next daytime meeting of the Spokane Drupal User Group!

When
Thursday, October 18, 2018, 10 AM to noon
We usually meet on a Thursday morning at a library out in the Spokane Valley area. Log in and join the Spokane Drupal User Group (see sidebar on https://groups.drupal.org/spokane-wa ) to be notified of future meetings, events, and discussions (typically just a few email messages per month).
Where
Spokane County Library - Argonne branch, 4322 N Argonne Rd, Millwood. We are currently meeting in the small conference room at the library. From the hallway, go into the library proper, past the checkout/information desk, take a right and you'll see the room on the right. Last month, we met at the Spokane Valley branch, but this time we're back at Argonne due to meeting room availability.
To be reminded, sign up!
To receive an email reminder closer to the date of the meeting, log in and click the "Sign up" button; log in and click "Cancel signup" at a later time if your schedule changes and you can no longer come. There's no obligation to come if you sign up (but we hope you will!). There's also no obligation to sign up in order to come (it's up to you if you want a reminder or not). However, the meeting could be canceled if the organizer isn't sure anyone is coming.
What
We spend two hours in a question and answer format, with the participants around a table, and a laptop with a projector. Come with questions about a project you're working on, something you've learned that you'd like to share with others, a desire to improve Drupal in some way (documentation, programming, design, marketing etc.), or a desire to help others with their projects and questions. Or just come and listen and observe.
Who
Everyone is welcome -- the only prerequisite is having some interest in Drupal. This group is usually 5-10 friendly people, with experience levels ranging from novice to expert, so you'll fit right in. Because of the size of the group, you will have time to share something you've learned, or get your questions answered, or both!
Need a ride?
If transportation is keeping you from attending, please post a comment here. Our usual attendees come from all around the area: downtown Spokane, Mead, Hayden, Spokane Valley, Post Falls, etc. So, we can probably find someone to give you a ride without going too much out of their way.

Comments

Date/Place

jhodgdon's picture

Just a comment... I looked at October 11, and neither Argonne nor Spokane Valley had a room available for that date. On October 18, only Argonne was available, so I reserved that. See you then!

Meeting notes

jhodgdon's picture

What we talked about today:

  • Upcoming Events:
    - BADCamp - Berkeley CA - Oct 24-17 - https://2018.badcamp.org/
    - Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit - Seattle - sometime in February?
    - DrupalCon - Seattle - April 8-12, 2019 - https://events.drupal.org/seattle2019 -- Tickets are about $500 and up -- early bird discount ends Oct 31. You can attend the Friday "sprint" (work) day for free. Also, after DrupalCon you can watch the sessions on YouTube for free (at least, that's been true in the past).
  • Security update for Drupal 7 and 8:
    https://www.drupal.org/sa-core-2018-006
    It would be a good idea to update your sites, but you probably don't have to run screaming right now to do it.
  • Testing stuff with simplytest.me:
    - https://simplytest.me/
    - You put in one or more "projects" to load (modules, themes -- check out the "Advanced Options" section to add more than one project -- you need to get all the dependencies yourself)
    - Then click "Launch sandbox", and it will spin up a Drupal site that you can use for 24 hours to play around and test the modules you are interested in
  • Migrating a site from Drupal 7 to either Backdrop or Drupal 8:
    - Start by making a fresh install of your destination (Backdrop or Drupal 8)
    - Add all the contributed modules/themes that you will need, and enable them on the destination site
    - Then use the build-in update/migration tools to grab the data and settings from your Drupal 7 site and move them into the destination site. (Not to be confused with the "Backup and Migrate" module, which is used to make backups of a Drupal 7 or 8 site, and the "migrate" that it does is just to make another copy of an existing site in the same version, like a test copy on your local computer.)
    - It won't be perfect, but it will get your content types and fields and views and etc. moved over. Then you can fix what's broken, redesign things, etc.
  • How long can you stay on Drupal 7?
    - See last month's meeting notes for the end of life discussion
    - However, there will probably be a team providing past end-of-life support for Drupal 7, just as there is now for Drupal 6
    - Backdrop is another alternative! Very much like Drupal 7.
  • REST - Web services to access/update the Drupal database other than from a Drupal site in a traditional browser-oriented manner (for example, from an app or from another web page outside of the main Drupal site, or to not even really have a main Drupal site -- "headless" Drupal or "decoupled" Drupal):
    https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/core/modules/rest/overview

    The documentation on drupal.org about REST is confusing, if you don't already know what's going on (which, at least I really don't!). I created an issue to make sure that the Drupal Documentation team is aware of the problem:
    https://www.drupal.org/project/documentation/issues/3007762

    So, instead of beating our heads on this documentation, we did a web search, and came up with this:
    https://drupalize.me/blog/201401/introduction-restful-web-services-drupal-8
    It looks like, besides this introductory blog post, Drupalize.me has a video series on web services, and some additional blog articles. Might be good -- most of their stuff is! The intro video and blog are free to look at; $35/month for membership after that. They have a lot of good videos!

    Remember also that Lynda videos are free if you have a Spokane city or county library card. They have a bunch of Drupal-related videos, probably not any about REST.

    https://buildamodule.com is another alternative, but they don't seem to have any on REST, $23/month for their subscription.

    It looks like OS Training also has some content related to REST:
    https://www.ostraining.com/blog/drupal/services/

    And there are some YouTube videos.

  • How can we make Drupal documentation better?
    - John suggested that we need to get professional documentation people interested in contributing to Open Source projects, specifically Drupal, in the same way as we have coders contributing to OS projects.
    - This would be good to suggest to the Documentation Working Group https://www.drupal.org/governance/doc-working-group
  • There is a group trying to improve the section of drupal.org that is about getting involved, contributing your time, etc. A "beta" version of the new Community landing page is at
    https://www.drupal.org/community/beta
    And there is a project working on improving the content:
    https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_org_community
  • Drupal Slack -- chat channels:
    https://www.drupal.org/slack
    Drupal Answers -- Stack Exchange for asking/answering Drupal questions:
    https://drupal.stackexchange.com/