Notes from May meeting, planning for June

Thanks to everybody who came out last night to our first meeting at Medaille! Many thanks again to Joe Flateau for the venue and handling all of the administrivia surrounding it. He's a rockstar for that.

Here's a summary - please chime in with your additional notes if you get a second... I was busy talking and trying to get phones to work. ;)

AUDIO
We had some, er, challenges with audio. It was (a) difficult to hear people dialed in and (b) impossible for them to hear the broadcast end. Lots of issues there, though it seemed like we were all okay with the screen sharing part of gotomeeting. There are some options that drupaldojo has put out there - I'm going to pursue those a little bit with them and will gear up for a better audio experience for next time. This probably means zone microphones for the room we're in and a little general sound support. I think I can accommodate most of that.

PRESENTATION MATERIALS
We were a little light on presentation material, but managed to gab for 90 minutes about a lot of little stuff. Here's a little redux on the topics and items referenced in the meeting:

• TEDxBuffalo... it's coming. Will it run Drupal? we'll see... but this is interesting and compelling... :)
• DevRights google group re: vendors supporting their APIs
• drupalcon sf preso on Services module, in particular this case study on BeerCloud which is kind of awesome... 70% of its resources go to serving up for mobile, as I recall.
• The state of Drupal as a Web Application & Product Platform at drupalcon sf
• @chx's part of MongoDB - Humongous Drupal at drupal sf, in particular the lack of transaction support and what that means... it's a really great low-to-high-level presentation on MongoDB, perhaps the best of the available "NoSQL databases"
• I'm starting a wiki page here of sites in WNY that use drupal. FILL IN THE BLANKS. Such a list is useful for business users encouraging adoption as well as firms trying to hold up examples of how Drupal is succeeding in the region.
• D7 release update.
• Buffalo ReUse is thinking about CiviCRM, kind of in the early planning stages right now.
• We also talked about caching strategies, using settings in ./admin/settings/performance and employing something like APC or memcached on the server. Also the panels caching for panel panes (like a "recent blog posts" view on a home page...) can be set flexibly based on additional contexts to reduce complex database trips. We didn't talk at all about MySQL optimization... any takers on a presentation? :)

GIVING BACK
- the Drupal Association is awesome. You should think about joining, especially if you're interested in supporting their initiatives, like:
- - 5 paid contracts available to help complete the Drupal.org redesign and CVS to Git migration
- There are lot of groups on g.d.o to think about joining beyond regional ones like ours. There are groups for modules (like Panels), overarching topics (like Media), and special interests (like Project Management).
- We all turn to the issue queues from time to time for fixes, updates, everything of that nature. If you're a developer and find yourself looking for a little project, think about doing some issue queue work. D7 needs a little help still, but there are also the project issue queues for modules we all know, love, hate-but-use-anyway and make our lives easier every day.

NEXT MEETING
- So... anybody have venue recommendations, either in Rochester or Buffalo?
- How's 15 June 2010 @ 7pm (3rd tuesday of the month... see a pattern?) Other recommendations???
- Preso suggestions/requests or volunteers are welcome... It's good to sit down & talk, but equally good to have some stuff prepared... I'm hoping some person can have at least one "check out this module I implemented" or "here's how I did this" preso every time in addition to the unfocused discussion (which is really awesome in its own right!). Thoughts???

Thanks again! I'm totally excited about our momentum.../BF