Waterloo Region

Hola!

I posted to kwlug-list asking about a web-based forms wizard; the first response has brought me here to investigate drupal. Quoting my post:

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blockquote> I'm looking for an open-source "forms wizard" such as the one found in Open Office. [...]

The existing project is in PHP, and we're using MySQL (v4) databases.

The set of tasks it should accomplish are:

1) allow non-programmer users to generate web-forms which can save data to the database
2) allow non-programmer users to define portions of the database as "views" which may be displayed in a spreadsheet-like format (optionally editable).

and:

3) validate input data according to preset criteria (eg., "account codes must match regex format" or "value must match an existing value in this other table")

Post-graduate fellowship in Semantic Web technologies for Content Management Systems
DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway

The Reasoning and Querying Unit at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for a Research Assistant, Masters or PhD fellowship position in the area of Semantic Web technologies for Content Management Systems.

Right now at Radio Waterloo Inc (CKMS-FM) we are working with joomla but we're looking to make the switch to drupal pending our work with the folks at vocalo.org. We have a tentative agreement that we're going to work together to foster similar awesomeness they made happen in Indiana/Illinois right here in the Region of Waterloo.

More details after the jump :).
Hello everyone!

Hello all.

There is currently plans for having the DrupalCamp for Toronto in summer. Three possible dates have been floated around.

Please chime in with your favorite date in this poll on the Toronto DUG group

http://groups.drupal.org/node/22086

Do this before Saturday please.

[We have a guest speaker from Ireland for our May meeting. The originally scheduled session for May will be pushed to June]

One of the key requirements for the Semantic Web to take off is the ability to express local content and its associated data model with existing well-known ontologies such as DC, FOAF, SIOC etc.

RDF data with a local RDF schema that doesn't have any references to other schema is not very useful.

For our June meeting, a few members of the group will show us cool things they have done in the course of developing web sites for their own or for clients.

We have Lana and Jen doing a 30 minute segment each showing all of us challenges they faced, things they learned, and other cool stuff that will be helpful.

We can use another person to fill another 30 minutes, or two for 20 minutes each. It can be anything from a nice looking theme, several contributed modules put together in a unique way, or anything else that you are proud of doing and wish to let others know how it was done.

This morning I attended an IRC meeting for local group organizers. Here are a few notes of interest:

The message below is from Andre Molnar, a long time fellow member of the Toronto DUG.

Please spend a few minutes to vote for him. We will then make him come over to Kitchener and show us the car with the Druplicon logo on it (and do a presentation too)!

Greatings Toronto Drupal folk,

I'm not sure how many of you might have heard about the fact that I'm entered into a contest to win a Nissan Cube. Maybe you've seen my tweets or caught it on Drupal Planet.

Basically, 50 'creative Canadians' out of a group of 500 will be given a Cube for keeps.

I try not to post support request here....but I'm really stuck.

For me, either a module works or it doesn't work....never have I had a module that works sometimes, and not work at other times.

VotingAPI is used on a site I'm helping out with and it seems to be crashing (just that one module, not the entire site). I've posted the issue here a week ago but there have been no replies. I'm grasping at straws for help.

GATE Village is the online community of Trusted Experts and Entrepreneurs that network together to form new business alliances and to compete for business brought to the Opportunity Auction for the membership's exclusive use by the corporation, all within an environment of trust managed by the GATE Trust System.

GATE Village uses DRUPAL 6.10 as its base, utilizing many of the existing core and contributing modules but GATE Village also requires significant new development around the GATE Trust System and the GATE Opportunity Auction.

This session will introduce the jQuery library, included with Drupal 5 and above. The session will assume little to no knowledge of JavaScript, though some basic knowledge of general programming concepts and PHP will be an asset. By the end of the session, you should feel comfortable using jQuery to do things like:

• Hide and show elements on a page (even those from contributed modules or core).
• Use animation to draw attention to specific components of your page, or to indicate when something has changed.
• Improve the usability of forms on your website.

Hello everyone ...

There are many ways to contribute to Drupal and open source in general. It is not limited to coding and programming.

One area that needs a lot of attention constantly (i.e. to cleanup after us developers) is documentation. The best code in the world will be bad code if there is no documentation on how to use it, install it, extend it, ...etc.

I've installed the image_fupload CCK module on a site we use internally. All the dependencies seem to be present but Image FUpload CCK says it's "not usable yet (missing).

I did install the latest 2.2 beta 5 of swfupload.swf, swfupload.js, swfupload.queue.js in sites/all/modules/image_fupload/swfupload and I've checked other modules...

I'm a bit stumped as to why it's not working...

Thanks...

Charles

Hi everyone! I messed up and booked an appointment next (the third) Thursday at 6:30p.m. Unfortunately it's an appointment that I cannot miss. I'm responsible for opening and closing The Working Centre and booking the equipment for our meeting. Is everyone okay if we post-pone until the last Thursday of the month?

Thanks a bunch!

Charles

As many of you know, DrupalCon DC 2009 just ended yesterday. This was four days of 1,400 people from around the world gathering to discuss Drupal things.

Waterloo Region was well represented with Chris Luckhardt from Cambridge, Andrew Berry from Guelph, and myself (Khalid Baheyeldin) from Waterloo.

Is your web site important to you?

Do you manage a large number of sites?

Ever wondered how your web sites are performing?

If so, then this presentation and discussion is for you.

Using Nagios, you can monitor your web sites. Not only can you monitor whether the host is up and the site is responding, but you can also monitor Drupal specific things.

What sort of things? And how are they helpful to you?

Well that is what we will unveil in the presentation.

See you all there.

Are you passionate about Drupal? Would you like to volunteer for the Drupal Association? Do you have skills that can help promote Drupal in new frontiers? Help organize events locally, regionally and globally?

If you answer yes to all the above, then the association is holding its second annual elections shortly. The deadline for applications is one day away. Applications are due by end of day tomorrow (February 10, 2009).

What are people using to 'robustly' profiling users on your Drupal 6 sites?

In Drupal 4, the only solution (when I started using it) was the core profile module...no Views support.

Then I started using Drupal 5 and used the Bio module since it was a profile-as-nodes solution and it supported CCK, Views and put it's custom fields on the user registration page.

It turns out that the 3rd Thursday falls right within my reading week. I'm going to be in Florida, so I won't be able to do a presentation about jQuery. Either someone else can take the topic, or I can do it on March 19th if there's interest.

For our January meeting, we will cover a topic that popular sites face sooner or later as they gain enough traffic.

It may be that your shared hosting provider is asking you to move your site away on their oversold server.

It may be that at certain times of days the site is like molasses in January.

It may be that the site has lost (or never had) the snappiness we all long for.

It may be that your site went unresponsive when it was on the front page of a popular site (Digg, Slashdot).

Whatever the case may be, this session is for you ...

We will do a forensic analysis of a real life slow site volunteered by one of our members. We will try to analyze where the problem(s) lie. We will follow that with solution(s) to speed the site.

Important Note: Please note that the day of week has changed. We are now meeting on the third Thursday of the month.

As discussed in our last meeting, we have changed the schedule to stay away from Friday evenings.

We are hoping that this fits most people's schedules, and encourage more folks to show up.

The venue is available on the Third Thursdays, and we will be holding our meetings on that schedule from now on.

Happy holidays to everyone, and see you 15th of January.

Hi.

I have a schedule conflict and will not be attending the Nov 7 meeting.

So, are you folk willing to discuss hosting on Nov 7 without me?

Or would you prefer to discuss another topic?

Any alternate topic suggestions and/or volunteer(s) for leading the discussion?

There is an Ontario Linux Fest on Saturday October 25, 2008 (that is two weeks from today).

Like last year, it has a Dot Org pavillion where open source projects can distribute literature and ask questions. Unlike last year, where Joomla had a presence there, and Drupal did not, we like to be present.

The day runs from 9:00 am to 6:30 am, so we need 2 or 3 volunteers who can answer basic questions on Drupal, and hand out some flyers.

In December, we will be discussing hosting for Drupal.

Our own Andrew Berry (deviantintegral), will present us with what he had to go through for a client, then we will follow with a round table discussion.

Here is the link to the Drupal 5.8 vs 6.3 performance benchmarks mentioned in the meeting on October 3rd:

http://vision-media.ca/resources/drupal/drupal-performance-benchmarks-58...

I try not to post support questions here....but I couldn't find any relevant posts on drupal.org....I have issues with a Drupal 5.10 site of mine where it seems to be over-loading the MySQL server. I get the odd (too common) "Unable to connect to database" screen that you get upon installing Drupal if you don't have the database setup and the settings.php files configured properly.

I certainly have that covered as the site is about 8 months old.

Organization:
The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) is a global think tank based in Waterloo, ON. Created in 2002, CIGI identifies and generates ideas for global change by supporting research, fostering exchange across disciplines, and providing informed advice to decision-makers on international governance issues.

The IGLOO Network - IGLOO.org - was established by CIGI in November 2004 as an online network that permits international collaboration, knowledge sharing and co-ordination among scholars, policymakers and students both from CIGI and external partners.

Thanks Khalid for the talk about Views, etc the other night. I know I've been needing to learn more about Views (specifically arguments) and this talk got me fired up to get some experience with it. I've been battling with arguments since Friday trying to get it working on some sites of mine...to no avail tho.

Ever wanted to get into extended Drupal by writing modules? Is that developer streak inside you yearning to express itself?

Then you are in for a treat on our next meeting ...

We have a special guest speaker James Walker (walkah). James is a co-founder of the first Drupal hosting company, Bryght (now Rain City Studios), and the training director at Lullabot. Not to mention that he has been developing for Drupal for more than 7 years!

I assume it is...I just wanted to make sure as I'm looking forward to it.

I could use a hand with some Drupal theming. I build/manage a bunch of sites and could use some help on various theme issues but I have an upcoming project that may need some heavier/more-formal theming.

Please contact me ASAP and it'd be helpful to see a live portfolio of some of your work.

The power of Drupal lies not only in its awesome core and API, but how this API can be extended to provide more functionality through useful modules.

Some of these tool function so well together that they allow one to create sites without writing any PHP code.

One such tool set is composed of the following Modules:

• CCK: the Content Construction Kit, allows defining fields and content types which are groups of fields.
• Views: Allows lists of nodes to be presented in various formats, and various criteria.
• Panels: Allows a combination of blocks to grouped into custom "section" pages.

This trio of tools allows someone who is not a developer/coder to create fairly complex web sites all from a web based interface.

We have a special guest presenter for our August meeting. Emma Jane Hogbin will join us and share an encore presentation of her DrupalCamp Talk "Moving In: or how to port your content from * to Drupal."

This topic was a huge hit at DrupalCamp and we are thrilled to be able to have Emma present it with lots of extra time for Q&A.

Come on out to the Special 4th of July meeting. We won't have real fireworks. Not inside. But we will have lots of fun discussing Drupal and our projects, discoveries and challenges.

Doors open at 6pm. Meeting starts at 7pm. Suitable for everybody from curious newcomers to confident gurus.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jswaby/sets/72157605580707583/

Here are my pictures from the meetup.. Not sure if others were planning on posting their photos. If you are, post what you think the tag should be so we could aggregate all the pics from the meetup.

Can anyone make a recommendation of who to use for Drupal hosting?

I have my own server but I find it's becoming overloaded and I don't want to get a second server and I may be having some issues with too many SQL connections. I was looking to get a shared hosting solution to compare performance with sites on my server.

I looked at one "Drupal Hoster" and in their terms, it mentions some limitations and the guy that was sitting beside me at the last meeting I think mentioned to stay away from such limitations. Their terms read:

"Acceptable use of DataBase Resources

Thanks for the talk on Theming last week. I learned a lot.

Two things...

1) was it 'Zen' or 'Zen_basic' that was the theme you recommended starting from? Is there a difference?
2) Martin - where can I find that PDF of Zen that you talked about that laid-out all the div's of the basic Zen theme....I want to try a crack at making a theme from scratch using it as a starting point to put your recommendations to work.

If you didn't know:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/drupalcamptoronto2008/

Post your photos on Flickr and tag them with drupalcamptoronto2008

Yay Photos!

What makes Drupal sites unique? Sure, modules do add functionality to a site, but they are mostly under the hood and may not be very visible nor obvious.

It is themes that make a Drupal site stand out. Similar concepts in other products/projects are called templates or skins.

The days where every Drupal site has the blue and grey Bluemarine look are over. There are now a huge variety in how Drupal sites look.

We will discuss themes in Drupal this month, again in a round table format, but before we do that, we will have an exciting presentation:

Since 2006, the Drupal community in Toronto has been holding annual DrupalCamps. Although it says "Toronto", we have seen people from as far away as New York, Winnipeg, and Vancouver come to attend the event.

This year, we are holding the 3rd annual DrupalCamp Toronto event.

The event will be held at the Bissell Building on the campus of the University of Toronto on May 23rd and May 24th 2008.

Attendance is free, but donations are welcome.

We will discuss contributed modules this month, in a round table format. Think about contributed modules:
- which modules do you use all the time?
- which modules do you want to know more about?
- which modules have you tried, then discarded? Why?

The round table discussion will give everybody a chance to contribute and the diversity of our group will give us all a chance to learn.

We will discuss contributed modules this month, in a round table format. Think about contributed modules:
- which modules do you use all the time?
- which modules do you want to know more about?
- which modules have you tried, then discarded? Why?

The round table discussion will give everybody a chance to contribute and the diversity of our group will give us all a chance to learn.

The first meeting of the Waterloo Region Drupal user group will be held on Friday 04 April 2008, at The Working Centre in Kitchener Ontario.

All with an interest in Drupal are welcome.

Topic: Getting to know Drupal (and you) - A round-table discussion of Drupal and our experiences with it.

The first meeting of the Waterloo Region Drupal user group will be held on Friday 04 April 2008, at The Working Centre in Kitchener Ontario.

All with an interest in Drupal are welcome.

Topic: Getting to know Drupal (and you) - A round-table discussion of Drupal and our experiences with it.