No More Red Line - Notes from 9/6 Meeting

Seven of us attended The Seattle Group's 2nd meeting. I took some notes during the meeting

After doing a round of introductions, we gathered some questions and subjects.

• If using Google Maps, how do you get two maps on one page? This question went unanswered, so if anybody knows please comment.
• CiviCRM
• CCK and Views (if time allows, otherwise a future meeting topic)

Many modules were mentioned during our discussions:

• Voting Module
• Civimail and link tracking
• Heat Tracking Module (New) - tracks mouse movement on a page
• Google Analytics Module - adds the code you need to hook into Google Analytics
• MapThing Module

Besides modules, we covered other topics as well. We discussed Google Maps and the Gmap module. When is it good idea to use Google Maps? Many times a static map with some image manipulation could solve the problem. Plus there is a lack of scalability with Google maps (too many points on your map will slow load times considerably). User privacy is an issue here as well if you wanted to show user-specific map info e.g. where do the Drupal Seattle Group members live? For geocoding info try gismo.

We reviewed Drupal Camps including the one we had here in June.

Gregory gave a great talk about Organic Groups and how Tobias might be able to use them for his project.

One last discussion revolved around salesforce vs. CiviCrm. It got long and complicated, so I'm not drawing any conclusions!

If you are new to Drupal a couple of Resources can help

IBM Developer Works: A series of articles from analysis through implementation. They even discuss multiple CMSs and why they chose Drupal. Really thorough. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html

Lullabot Podcasts: It's great to start at the beginning. The first couple of podcasts give a great introduction to Drupal and Drupal lingo http://www.lullabot.com/podcast

Logistics:

We found out that our meeting place, the Red Line, was recently purchased. It was open but missing some of our favorites like pizza and beer. That led to a discussion of the best place to meet.

Based on a quick discussion, we are looking to move our meeting location to downtown instead of Capitol Hill. Here are the main requirements:

• wifi
• beer
• food
• area to use a projector

Gregory recommended Top Pot, but we all wondered if they served doughnuts and beer? Hmmm....Is that even a good combo?

I will be doing a little research to try to find a good place, but I sure would love to hear some suggestions. I will set up a poll once we have a couple of options to choose from.

Don't forget:

Jim Hightower will be here next week at Town Hall