Meetup January 2009 - At McDonalds in Apple Valley

Happy new year! Hope everyone had a great holiday!

The High Desert Drupal group meets every month. 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?

Our group has been meeting for several months now and people are really getting their hands dirty with Drupal. Last month a couple members of the group shared projects they were working on using Drupal. That was very awesome. It was really cool seeing people from our group actually using Drupal. So what are we talking about this month?

First Half

This month I would like us to follow a similar format as last month. For the first hour we will have an open mic session where anyone can talk about a Drupal module(s) that was a diamond in the rough. Did you come across something in Drupal that you just thought was awesome, and want to share this knowledge with the group? In preparing for what you want to share with the group, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

• What problem were you trying to solve?
• Did you find a module to solve this problem?
• How did you find the module?
• Did you write a module?
• Did you have any FormAPI epiphanies? nodeapi?
• Did you do something cool with Views and CCK?

The answer to many common Drupal questions is Views and CCK. I would love to see someone show the group how they used Views and CCK to solve a problem. Participation in sharing your knowledge IS NOT required, but it is definitely encouraged.

Please spend some time over the next week to think about what you want to share at the group.

Second Half

The second hour we will continue on with Sam's candy site. We will primarily focus on setting up CCK, Taxonomy, and Views. We will even crack open the database to see how data is stored in CCK and Taxonomy. We will also briefly touch on how to use the Drupal API to get information out of these tables without writing direct queries against the database (only if people are interested in API geeky stuff).

This should be a great meeting. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Where are we meeting?

We are meeting in the McDonalds 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.

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.