18 People Attend May Meetup in Altamonte Springs

The second monthly meeting of the Florida Drupal group met on Saturday, May 17 at MindComent's offices in Altamonte Springs, Florida. Attendance was great, with 8 new people in addition to 10 who also attended the April meeting.

Joe Moraca gave a "getting started with Drupal" talk that covered everything from downloading the code from Drupal.org to transitioning from a development server to a production server. Some of the many topics touched on were:

• Downloading Drupal
• Resources on Drupal.org
• Various versions of Drupal
• Setting up LAMP stack on Windows/Mac/Linux
• Creating new DB and DB user
• Overview of Drupal core directories
• Uncompressing and installing on your hard drive
• Going through the Drupal installer
• Clean URLs
• Creating admin user
• Admin section
• Adding modules
• Changing themes
• Adding content
• Moving site from development server to production server

Our next meet-up will be on Saturday, June 21, 2008 from 1 to 5 PM at MindComent's offices in Altamonte Springs, Florida. This will be a 2-topic meeting with Ryan Price covering CCK and myself (Mike Anello) covering Views. We'll be covering these two topics using Drupal 6. Orginially, we were going to cover theming and Views, but we decided it made more sense to go with CCK and Views in the same day. The theming topic will be covered in July.

For those of you new to Drupal, CCK is the "content construction kit" - a module that allows site admins to create new "content types" for the web site. For example, a "car" content type might provide fields for "year", "make", "model", "color", etc. This allows the site admin much more flexibility in content management as well as display options. The Views module provides a super-flexible way for site admins to decide how lists of content are presented to the user.

Finally, we decided to kick off each meeting with a 20-minute quick question and answer session. Anyone can ask the group any question on any Drupal related topic providing the question can be asked and answered in a short period of time. If you can't make the meetup, feel free to ask the question in the comment section of this post.

-mike