August 16 Meeting Wrap-up

The Florida Drupal User's Group met this past Saturday - about 7 people were in attendance. The group broke down as follows:

Thanks to Andrew and MindComet for letting us use their facilities! If you have a need for Interactive Marketing, please check them out.

Panels 2

I (Mike Anello) spoke about Panels, covering the basics, terminology, and new features in Panels 2. I then built two panel pages (using Panels 2 RC1 and Drupal 5) - one a simple page with custom content and various views (utilizing the "view panes" module of panels) that might be used as a home page, and one as a "node override" page that utilized node and user context to pull in data related to the rest of the page. The resources I mentioned are:

Panels module page on Drupal.org
Panels 2 introductory screencast
Panels 2 "context" screencast
Explanation of "context"

Taxonomy/Pathauto

Andrew Riley spoke about taxonomy and pathauto. He discussed the advantages of using pathauto for search engine optimization (SEO) as well as ease-of-use. He also covered the basics of taxonomy and gave various examples of how it can be used.

He then set up a sample content type and taxonomy vocabulary to demonstrate how to set up a taxonomy system. He also discussed all the various settings of pathauto, what they mean, and when to modify things. Specifically, he modified some of the default path settings for custom content types and how they can be beneficial for SEO and navigable URLs.

One example he demonstrated was using pathauto to utilize the "termpath-raw" token as part of the default path alias for a specific content type. This then allows specific blocks to be displayed when content tagged with a specific term using the "page-specific visibility settings" option.

As a group, we then created a hierarchial taxonomy to demonstrate its use and options, including related terms.

Some links of interest:
Hierarchical Select - cool jQuery hierarchical navigation.
Taxonomy Lineage - might be useful for views integration with hierarchical menus.

Upcoming Meetings

There was discussion about having a image handling workshop soon. There is considerable interest in configuring imagecache, image integration with views, thickbox, CCK, and other image-related modules in Drupal. The first current opening is November 15 - if there is considerable interest, we can move it up. Let us know in the comments. Also, if anyone is interested in giving this talk, post it in the comments below.

There is also considerable discussion about additional theming workshops. We discussed stringing a bunch of them together (see below) and then applying the lessons to re-theming a local non-profit's web site.

We also discussed the initial planning of a one-day, two-track Orlando Drupal Camp before the end of the year. If anyone has any ideas of locations or potential sponsors, let us know.

Saturday, September 20
SEO - Jose Rey

Saturday, October 18
Module Development - Mike Anello
Organic Groups - Ryan Price

Saturday, November 15
Image handling and Galleries (imagecache, thickbox, imagefield) - ???

Future Meeting topics
Theming: views
Theming: theme function overrides
Theming: CSS and Drupal
Theming: template files
Theming: review and full site theming
Site planning
Coder module
Drupal performance
Mapping/GIS
Issue Queue/Creating/Applying Patches
Module Development focused on FormAPIs
Adobe Flex
User-friendly admin (Workspace module, RootCandy theme, etc...)