Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup -- December 8th

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maristgeek's picture
Start: 
2011-12-08 18:00 - 20:00 America/New_York
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

Where: Room 205, Old Laundry Building, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie
When: December 8th, 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Directions: http://tinyurl.com/VassarCollegeOLB
Be sure to click on things and read some gotchas, try satellite view too. Destination in green, parking in red, roads in blue.

Plans: This month is a Show and Tell month, so come prepared to show off a website you have done, a project you are working on, a new technique that everyone should now....or just plain Drupal awesome-ness.

We will have internet access, dual projectors with VGA, RCA or HDMI connections available for laptops as well as access to a Mac or Linux workstation if you are nice to Ben.

Comments

I've been playing around with

sdague's picture

I've been playing around with Responsive design on the new mhvlug.org website. I'll happily show that off.

Notes from the meetup

maristgeek's picture

Most of the group this month was either new to Drupal or just haven't done any work lately which led to a short sharing of cool and helpful modules, but the list is:

  • Views Hacks - A set of small Views add-ons that provide useful functionalities like expose blocks as objects or add a reset button to filters.
  • Services - A standardized solution of integrating external applications with Drupal that allows a Drupal site to provide web services via multiple interfaces while using the same callback code.

Miscellaneous conversation:

  • Conversations started off with Minecraft of all things. Alex has a strong interest in running Minecraft servers and is looking to do something with statistics pulled from Minecraft. It sounded like pulling information out of the server with server-side Python scripts was not going to be a problem and pushing this to a Drupal site running with Services was the way to go (reminder, use REST not SOAP). As a bonus he showed off how a set of scripts can take map data and generate an intense 3D map that even shows tunnels.
  • Sean continued sharing his love of responsive web design and showed off his work on some http://mhvlug.org redesign work. This is a Drupal 6 site with a theme based on Omega that works out quite well. The important things to learn when starting out in responsive designing:
    • css media selectors
    • <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

    Remember, don't make mobile themes be responsive.

  • The JavaScript plugin Chosen came up again because it makes forms awesome and user-friendly. Words cannot do justice to what the plugin does so go to its page and check out what it does to normal everyday select boxes. And when you want to implement it on your Drupal site install the module.
  • Last month Martha launched the Drupal re-incarnation of vanderbiltgarden.org, a website for the non-profit organization dedicated to the rehabilitation and continuing beauty of the formal gardens of the F. W. Vanderbilt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, NY. She did a great job with her first site, especially compared to what the previous site provided (archive.org copy). After showing us around conversation migrated to conversation about http://nycharities.org and problems Non-Profits have to tackle.

Our next meetup will occur January 12th, featuring Vonn New discussing zip code proximity searching.

Reponsive Design

vonn.new's picture

Sean's demo of responsive design on the MHVLUG.org site was great! I've already put the techniques he showed to work and am so pleased with the results. The only problem is that I am wasting too much time resizing my window to watch the theme respond.