First Meetup August 2008 - At McDonalds in Apple Valley

This is the first High Desert Drupal meetup. Our plan is to meet every month on the third Wednesday of the month. However, the meeting date may change depending on the feedback we get from the group.

This local group is a nice place for people to learn and talk about Drupal, a world popular content management system (CMS). We also plan to talk about web development in general, covering all aspects from planning, design, development, and maintaining a web site. RSVP is not required and attendance is free. Tell all your friends!

What are we going to talk about?

Helior and I met earlier this week to talk about this. We have several ideas of things we want to talk about, but the purpose of this first meeting is to get to know everyone, and second hopefully be informative. An outline of suggested things we'll talk about is below. We may not touch on everything, given the time frame, and other unknowns, but this outline will give you an idea of the basis of this group.

• The first meeting
  • What we expect to accomplish from this group? (Tom Speaking)
    • Everybody is a teacher
  • Talk about the audience each role in the audience (Helior Speaking)
  • Why are the questions in the introduction relevant? (Helior)
  • Introductions (Helior)
    • Where do you work?
    • What projects are you currently working on? What technologies?
    • Are you working professionally in the web dev industry?
    • Are you looking for work?
  • What is open source? (Helior)
    • Why is it great to work with open source?
  • Why its bad to work in a vacuum? How you can start to use other people's code, and contribute back. (Tom)
  • Libraries (Tom)
    • JavaScript Library's
      • YUI
      • Protoype
      • mootools
      • scriptaculous
      • extjs
      • jQuery - (Tom gives short demo)
    • PHP
      • Zend Framework
      • CakePHP
      • Symfony Project
      • Joomla!
      • PEAR
      • Drupal - (Tom gives short demo on adding an event calendar to a web site)
        • Will talk about Pseudo code of doing it the hard way (i.e. without a framework)
        • Then show the Drupal way. (i.e. CCK, Views, Date, etc...)
    • CSS
      • YUI Grids
      • Blueprint
  • With all the other choices out there, why should you use Drupal? (Tom speaking)

We all need to thank Darlene, aka. "Dar", at McDonalds for allowing us to use their small conference room at the Apple Valley McDonalds on the corner of Apple Valley Rd and Bear Valley Rd. The room seats up to 49 people and is free to use, which is a big plus, so lets make sure we show some gratitude when we show up.

If you plan on attending, sign up for an account on this site and then click the "Sign Up" button below to let us know you're coming. You DO NOT have to sign up on this site to attend, you can just show up. If you do sign up, you'll be emailed a reminder for the meeting on one day before the meeting.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions.