February Tampa Bay Meetup (#6)

I don't know enough to present, but I do have a suggestion for a topic.. Errors. What can go wrong, what types of errors might we see (Drupal vs PHP) and where to look for troubleshooting pointers. Maybe debugging tools.

Please help spread the word about http://fldrupalcamp.org. I see some of you are registered already, but the more the merrier! Thanks.

The video and following web/page had good intel and was very informative. Created by Laura Scott at PingV.com

http://pingv.com/blog/a-peek-at-drupal-7-theme-system-changes

Thanks for chiming in to get us to follow up on this DeVaunte. I've been meaning to post my notes, but just haven't been able to carve out the time to do so. So I'll make it happen now :)

Attendance was a bit lower this last meeting. Seems a lot of people still had stuff going on, and weren't able to make it. But it was definitely still a good meeting. I was prepared to go over Views, but since most of the folks that were there are already familiar with Views, and I was a bit late, we ended up not doing that.

The group decided to focus on what the next serious of discussions/meetings should be about and we charted out a new course for the next few meetings. Here is what was proposed.

Future Meeting Topics

March - SEO - Harry

Harry has offered to go over the basics of SEO and how to get your site to perform well in Google, et. al.

April - Views Module - Chris

I'll finally go over views. I sure hope I can make it worth the wait it's been! ;)

May - Features Module - Mike

Mike offered to walk us through some standard usage of the Features module, and show us how that could be useful on projects.

June - Panels Module - Michelle?

Michelle was not at the meeting, but some members of the group thought she might be interested/capable of presenting this. If that doesn't work out, there were some back up presenter volunteers.

July - Context Module - Adam

Adam offered to show off the Context module, and how it can be useful in development of a new site.

Another idea for a topic was going over Drush. Harry said he has experience and would be willing to talk about it, but we didn't formally outline a date/plan for that talk.

Additional Community Tools

In some of our conversation during the meeting it surfaced that some folks would like more community interaction than just http://groups.drupal.org. The meetings can be a bit harder to find, depending on when their posted, how active the group is for the month, etc. Additionally we don't have any simplfied manner to communicate amongst all the meeting users via groups.drupal.org either.

New Tampa Site

So we revisted the fact that Mike owns tbdug.com (Tampa Bay Drupal User Group). He volunteered to host a Drupal site for us on said domain, that we can use to organize, etc. We will continue to post meetings on drupal.org to keep exsposure up for our meetings, but those of us who are regulars can plan stuff out there with more focus on Tampa.

Note: It looks like Mike has the base install up now, so you can go on and request an account.

Additionally, since the group has a number of users that are fairly green to Drupal, this will give us a playground where we can potentially play around a bit and learn/demo stuff as well.

We discussed some potential Drupal installs for the new site:

• Open Atrium
• Open Enterprise
• Drupal Gardens
• Drupal Commons

It was decided we'd try Open Enterprise, as Mike has had some experience with all of the above and preferred Open Enterprise. It was also stated, that if we as a group didn't like it, we can always wipe the board clean and start again. Using Open Enterprise will allow us to get a basic community site with events/calendar/blog/etc. out of the box.

Communication Options

Mike volunteered to look into some options that may allow us to communicate easier and more directly, without having to type in the 20+ e-mails each time we want to have a group discussion. We were thinking/hoping we could find a module that we could install on the site that might help faciliate this, and give us some mail-list type functionality. We brought up the SimpleNews module, but concluded that is more newsletter (1 -> many, not many -> many) and likely not as appropriate.

Until we find something to help in that regard, it was suggested that we use something like MailChimp.com to send out reminders to the group regarding upcoming meetings, recaps, etc. As some people have problems receiving/parsing messages from groups.drupal.org.

General Discussion

After those talks, we kind of broke down into smaller groups and just discussed whatever Drupal related topics we felt like. I'm not sure what others talked about, but some of us showed off some Drupal sites we've worked on and talked about how we did what we did, or modules that we used to meet the needs, etc.

Over all it was a good meeting, and I very much look forward to the coming meetings. Hope to see you all there!

-Chris