Posted by sime on April 24, 2006 at 3:04pm
According to drupal.org there are plenty of Australian sign-ups. No doubt most of these are not active for whatever reason. But what about the others who were interested once but moved away when they saw little activity in their area? Personally, I signed up with Drupal and then tried two other CMS systems before the worm turned.
Another thing I'm interested in is any group which might share an affinity with Drupal. Obviously we shouldn't bombard other organisation's mailing lists, so any news about related meet-ups and whatever would be more than appreciated. Anyway, the topic is here so go postal!
Comments
Web Standards Group
http://webstandardsgroup.org
This grew out of Melbourne as I understand it (Australia at least). In fact, David McDonald who was at Drupal's first Australian Drupal meetup (that fact still blows me away) told me he was a founder.
The reason I think this group is important is because of Drupal's reputation for good xhtml, and my strong belief that it is a superb toolbox for creating standards-compliant cms. (That's "strong" inside "strong" tags, btw.)
So as soon as davemac joins this group, I'd like to hear what he thinks about possible exchanges with WSG. David?? Where art though?
Not quite correct.
The Web Standards Group grew out of Sydney, and was formed by Russ Weakley and Peter Firminger. It has a very active mailing list and a large number of active members.
After a while, Russ asked myself and Andrew Fernandez if we would like to help setup a Melbourne group, which we did, with their help. Other branches of the WSG also sprung up in most Australian cities, and even in New Zealand. Due to work and life commitments, Dez and I handed over the reigns to Lachlan Hardy and Matt Magain, who are now doing a fantastic job.
I have already actually spoken to Russ briefly about maybe one day moving the WSG CMS, which was hand written many years ago, over to Drupal. It would be perfect for it, and I hope to follow that discussion up when we both have some time.
David McDonald
Web Designer
http://www.davidmcdonald.org
Thanks davemac
Oh, and if you have any spare tickets to one of their seminars...
Next Web Standards Meeting
Details can be found here.
David McDonald
Web Designer
http://www.davidmcdonald.org
Melbourne PHP UG
http://melbourne.ug.php.net
I am going to my second ever IT flesh-mesh in May. It's the monthly meetup of the Melbourne PHP User Group.
I know their website is Mambo. But they haven't moved to Joomla yet, so surely they're thinking Drupal?? Not to worry. I'll be dropping in with a friend of mine who's done this gig before. Perhaps my only goal is to move him away from the darkside of proprietary CMS - he doesn't realise the damage he's doing.
Look for the guy who won't be wearing a Drupal t-shirt. Maybe if I can get my hands on a Drupal stick-pin...
drupalusers on Frappr
http://www.frappr.com/drupalusers
It makes none-the-sense to sign up to everything, but I reckon signing up to this is cool. As it is I see a few Australians are signed up there already. Can't wait until the Googlians pick up a Melways though.
Note: I got this one out of someone's blog. Sorry for not providing the source, I can't find it.
Hope to have this here
Ideally, we'll turn on gmap support here on the groups site, and have the maps directly on this site. So I'm not promoting that external service.
That will be great.
I'd prefer not to use 3rd party tools. But the Australian network is very thin, so I'll try anything :-)
Sydney PHP UG
I attended my first PHP UG meeting this evening, with the folks at the Sydney PHP Users Group. Let me tell you - they did not leave me with a very good first impression. The organiser of the group was away in America, and apparently he is the only one who can let people into the building - so we couldn't even access our venue! Luckily, it was an office building, so those of us that turned up (5 of us, of whom 2 left after 10 minutes) were able to gather in the foyer. It sounded like the organiser had meant to cancel this month's meeting, but didn't bother to tell anyone.
What's more: not only had the attendees never heard of Drupal (understandable - not everyone's into CMSes), but quite a few of them thought that open source is a bad idea. I felt like saying: if that's so, when WTF are you doing at a PHP UG meeting? PHP itself is open source, and PHP probably has more open source apps written in it than almost any other programming language!
I could have forgiven them even for that - were it not for the lack of snacks, which they had advertised would be provided. :-p
However, I think I might just go again, for a few reasons. Firstly, I'm not a quitter. Secondly, they reckon that they usually get more people, and that they've never before been locked out of their venue. Thirdly, I think that Sydney deserves better from its official PHP group than what I got, and I want to help make it better. And finally, despite all my complaints, I did actually have a long and enjoyable chat with the other people that turned up (and they were very nice people).
I don't have very high hopes about the SydPHP UG as a Drupal recruiting ground, either (in case you hadn't guessed). :-\
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Great post
So, you have the opportunity to become "the drupal guy" at the sydney PHP UG!
Jeremy, interesting reading
Jeremy, interesting reading your comments about the SydPHP Group. Yes it has been difficult organising the group this year. There are 3 admins for the group - we all work full time and have commitments outside IT. Due to this sometimes its just not possible to organise the group meetings - it may look a shambles at times but it's not done on purpose to annoy anyone.
We are always looking for ways to make the group more popular, easier to run and manage. If you have any suggestion feel free to contact one of the admins via the forums. At the moment for instance we are looking for a more solid venue (organising the venue can take a few days per month sometimes).
You (and/or anyone you know) are more than welcome to come and talk about Drupal, or anything else PHP related (the group once used Drupal for the site but found it unsatisfactory for the task).
Other things that can help smooth the organisational problems are...
- organising speakers (a few months in advance)
- volunteer a few hours per week/month to maintain site content etc etc...
- organising RSVPs
It may sound simple but at times it isn't - especially when a speaker does not turn up or we get locked out of our meeting room... and then when you've done everything right and organised a good speaker but only 5 people turn up... well you can see that this can be annoying.
Hope to see you and any other drupal people at the next meetings.