Chennai Drupal Meet showed the energy of the Drupal community in Chennai

As always, the Chennai Drupal Meet showed the energy of the Drupal community in Chennai. Increasingly, there are more number of youngsters using Drupal in Chennai. It’s still amazing to see how people from such diverse backgrounds come together at the Drupal meet.

Let me introduce the three new members, Thany, Krishna Kumar and Marco, who joined us this time.

Thany has been a freelancer and web developer since his college days. His websites in Drupal are utilitarian and yet simple. He has a good knowledge regarding Drupal modules. He is very current with his Drupal skills. He currently uses Drupal 6 and Views 2 for his on going projects.

Krishna kumar is a young .net programmer who, out of his own interest has started using Drupal. He feels that Drupal is light weight and building modules in Drupal is a lot easier than .net. For example, in .net we need to compile dlls each time we introduce a new functionality in the website.

Marco is the second Frenchman to join the Chennai Drupal community, introduced to our group by Frederick.

The others at the meet where Bhinu, Jo, Frederick, Gomathi, Abdu, Vinodh, Vidhya, Anbarasan and me.

The meet started with introductions followed by a Question and Answer session.

Q: Frederick is working on a Chennai French portal, www.clubfrancechennai.com , using Drupal. Are there any alternatives to nice menu for dropdown menus? Nice menu does not function properly in Safari, Mac.

A: Thany recommended that he choose News flash theme from www.roopletheme.com. The website is very interesting and is a must add to one’s Drupal resources.

Q: Bhinu : How do we add emoticons in the text area?
A: Use of YUI Rich Text Editor and TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor were recommended to handle this issue.
Q: Bhinu: How do you display the online status of members on a Drupal website?
A: Checkout http://drupal.org/project/avatar_blocks. For some custom code on who’s online visit http://drupal.org/node/66638. These can be used besides the default Who’s online block in Drupal
Q: Bhinu: How do we display video on a website?
A: Recommendations:
1. Display links from You tube. However, we need to check copyright issues associated with Youtube for the same.
2. Thany recommended the use of SWF tools, http://drupal.org/project/swftools
3. FFmpeg converters can be an option only if they have their own dedicated server. Most hosting servers do not support FFmpeg convertors.
The Question Answer session was followed by a presentation on Module development by Anbarasan.

The presentation covered the following points:
1. The Drupal handbook link on Custom module development, http://drupal.org/node/508
2. The use cases of custom modules -
to create our own menu callback (a URL in our websites, with a specific functionality), to create custom blocks , custom forms, custom nodes, custom business rules or to override Drupals functionality.
3. The importance of following coding standards specified at http://drupal.org/coding-standards. It takes care of a lot of good practices and even a few security related aspects.
4. Place custom modules the sites/all folder. The reason for not updating the Drupal’s core directory is to facilitate easy future updates. All contributed and custom modules pertaining to our website should be placed in the sites/all/module folder. A similar sites/all/theme folder is to be used for themes.
Checkout http://drupal.org/node/70151
5. Creation of custom menu callback, associating a function with the callback and in the function printing some information. Anbarasan, all demonstrated how to enable the module he created.
Next was a demo by Thany on Views 2 and its features. In the presentation:
1. Thany demonstrated the ease of use and the all new features it had. For the Demonstration Than used on of his current sites which had Events as a custom node type, built using CCK, http://drupal.org/project/cck
2. Followed it by creating a block with these events being listed using Views 2.
3. He also created a page with the listing , used Ajax for the pagination. He achieved all this with Views 2.
Must read on Views 2:
http://drupal.org/node/322837
He also mentioned about how he enabled category based Google news feeds by using a widget from www.widgetbox.com
Anbarasan, ended the meet with a slide on Form API. The Slides detailed the various stages in the formation of the form array before it is rendered, starting with menu callback. At the end of the session the features that were providing additional value to the Forms in terms of check_plain, check_url, md5 token generation, where highlighted. In the case that in our custom module one wishes to use a custom HTML instead of using Form API, a set of features need to be kept in mind to make the HTML secure.
Team Activity:
1. Collaborate to create website for Non Profit organizations in the region. A plan to start the same for a home in Cudapah. This will be initiated by Shyamala Rajaram. Any member of the community can contribute towards the site creation. The details of the Project and the various help required will be detailed on the Chennai Drupal Community.
2. A need to organize more Barcamps, a casual way of discussing & spreading Drupal.