Drupal Group Meetup

I'll second that motion, thanks for initiating. Yeeeah!

I am glad to let you know what happened. Solaureum and I met and we discussed some new developments in social networking tools and in online commerce/exchange/complementary currency tools. We reviewed if it was possible to use a combination of Drupal Commons and the http://drupal.org/project/mutual_credit Mutual Credit module to create a new distribution of Drupal that facilitates peer-reviewed knowledge sharing, community leadership, Government "2.0" stuff, and of course sharing resource through an online currency. Solaereum is on a mission to see something like this happen, and we talked about some of the existing implementations again (Webspirit Nexchange, ARC).

We also installed Drupal 7 RC and it took about 2 minutes. Played around with it. Seems to work well for a simple site now - didn't go in depth with it. Was wondering if Commons, etc. would be updated to 7 anytime soon. There's a lot of contrib updates to reach that it seems.

Joe, thanks for your contributions on MySQL 5.5. Let us know how that works? I switched my servers to MariahDB awhile back, because of the Oracle thing, and they have on their roadmap to update it to 5.5 soon. Described as, "MariaDB is a backward compatible, drop-in replacement of the MySQL® Database Server. It includes all major open source storage engines." Drupal 7's Installation tool now mentions that MariaDB is a viable option. Who knows where it will go, if MariahDB dies, then I'll just install MySQL.

There was a mention about some SOU student that might be interested in our Group - perhaps he will show next time. Following up on our meetings, Joe, it seems like we need to re-establish some kind of grounded expectations for what a "Drupal designer/developer/engineer/webmaster' would "know". Of course, as Drupal becomes more popular, there will be many people entering in, and Ego can easily take over to lead one to claim their part without having the proper foundations or understandings. So, the Group, to me, still functions as the place where we get to know each other, and its a pre-condition for being listed on our S. Oregon Providers page, as listed there. If you want to be known as a Drupal developer, then it would make sense to show yourself and be recognized and have something to do with promoting it in an Open Source fashion. Seems like this is a necessary step as things become more complex. I realize that in our "union" that you would be a Sr. Developer, along with Hozt, and that upon entrance people would heavily benefit from recognizing the existing talents and from learning, watching, and cooperating vs. taking title on their own.

Thanks for giving an opportunity to do a write up, hope to see you next time. Sorry it was a brief notice, its just my youthful folly driving my schedule a lot of the time.

I would have liked to attend the meeting also, but did not see the notice until after the meeting had passed. It would be cool if we could set some kind of standard meeting time each month or two that we can all put it on our calendars.

It may take some time before Drupal Commerce is ready for prime time. When it is stable hopefully that will make developing ecommerce sites much easier than dealing with all the quirks of Ubercart. Magneto looks like a good product, but if you need the features that are in the professional or enterprise editions then it starts to cost real $$$.