October Meetup Wrapup

Another great meetup, we had 15 attendees and spent 4 hours talking all things Drupal. This was a 4-hour meetup, covering multiple topics. We had some new faces and covered quite a few topics.

Check out everything we covered after the jump...

Drupal News

• Views 2 is out!
• New Drupal book (in progress) - Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery
• Another new Drupal book - Drupal in Action - cyberswat recommends this for non-programmers or users new to Drupal.
• Lullabot partners with Bond Art + Science and Ed Sussman to launch new Drupal company to create easy-to-use Drupal-based platform.
• Acquia launches Acquia Drupal, their hardened and supported version of Drupal. We ended up talking quite a bit about Acquia and their role in the Drupal community as well as the cost(s) of their services.
• DrupalCon (North America) to be in Washington, D.C., March 4-7. First 100 signups to pay only $125, signup time to be announced on Twitter (#Drupalcon).
• Florida Drupal Service Providers - add your Florida-based Drupal consulting company.
• Drupal screencast sources: Drupal Dojo, drupalcon.org, groups.drupal.org screencasts (includes BADCamp), Raincity Studios

Drupal Camp Florida Planning

• Simpler is better - especially for our first Camp!
• Date poll - February 7/8 (weekend after the SuperBowl) is in the lead, only 8 votes so far though.
• There is an "Official" Drupal Camp Logo
• Jobs table - need distinct and separate area? Should we even do it?
• Need to ensure that we're not forced out of the location at a certain time - allows the ability for attendees to network.
• Sponsors - offer to post their info on t-shirts, registration areas, web site. Maybe allow sponsors to present or showcase their company, have different level sponsors
• North and South Florida outreach (Mike)
• Tracks/Schedule (Bob, Joe) - views, cck, theming, Birds-of-a-feather, project management, etc... Research popular sessions at other recent DrupalCamps.
• Provide food, t-shirts? swag? books (Joe), videos, other stuff? - need to get estimates on attendance is set.
• Charge a token fee to ensure registrants show up to avoid no shows in a limited attendance location? If so, be sure to advertise the fact that we'll have limited room.
• Investigate local umbrella non-profits to help with financial stuff (Steve, Darren)
• Camp web site - barcamp style? (Kevin)
• Organizing committee conference calls (Joe)
• First conference call: Tuesday, October 28, 9PM. For those of us that have tasks, let's all try to make some progress by then. Joe will provide call-in number.

Show and Tell

Our meeting host, MindComet, recently launched a Drupal-powered web site for the Disney Children's Hospital.

Bob showed us a top-secret site that we're not allowed to post/discuss/remember (or he'll have to kill us).

Module Development

I gave a presentation/lesson on developing Drupal modules. Download the presentation below and the files here.

Utica Fire Department Project

John gave a presentation about a site he's working on to post 18+ years of Fire Department data (10,000+ records of dispatches, incidents, company reports, etc...) online. He's looking for a way to directly move FoxPro data to MySql - if anyone has any ideas on this, please leave a comment. He's relatively new to Drupal and is learning it as he goes. His presentation was mainly a Q&A where we all helped troubleshoot various small issues he was having. He was also looking for recommendations on how to do particular tasks, which modules to use, etc...

Theming Basics

Joe Moraca gave a quick presentation on the basics theming in Drupal. He talked about Drupal's core themes, the Zen theme, the various files in a theme, Firebug, and various template functions.

Our next meeting is scheduled for Saturday, November 15 - the topic will be "using imagecache, imagefield, thickbox (and lightbox2 and maybe views) to create galleries".