Meetup February 2009 - At McDonald's in Apple Valley

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?

A little planning goes a long way.

This month we’ll be taking a closer look into the development of Sam’s Sweet Thoughts candy store project and driving it further into completion. This time for real, seriously.

Throughout the process of creating content-specific fields with the use of CCK, we will explore some very useful methods of presenting the data with the use of the imagecache and views contributed modules.

For those who are unfamiliar, Imagecache is a module that automates the monotonous task of resizing, cropping, color adjusting, etc. of images that have been uploaded to your Drupal site. This allows you to output your images through as many different presentational “presets” as you can build, all while preserving the original copy on the server.

The Views module will provide us an interface where we can customize and filter the content information we want to be presented on to the page. Exciting stuff, if you’re a geek.

Harnessing the power of CCK + Imagecache + Views is an invaluable skill-set to have in your Drupal tool belt. It may be confusing to new users, but is arguably one of the more rewarding “learning-curve” obstacles to overcome.

Something for everyone..

As always, we encourage everyone to share their experiences they’ve had with Drupal (or anything web related) to the group. Our purpose is to help one another become more resourceful and to grow as web developers. So ask questions, share your favorite modules, give feedback, participate, and give back to your community!

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.