Next meeting Wednesday, December 14, 2011 @ 6:30 pm
Location:
Webster 102 on Amherst College campus
https://www.amherst.edu/users/H/dhamilton/drupal_meetings
Many thanks to David Hamilton for again arranging the space!
AGENDA: Make suggestions or proposals in the comments; will revise details here as we have them.
Drupal Camp MA 2012
We'll talk about this at the meetup too. Anyone interested in helping out, doing a sessions, etc., please come.
Drupal Camp MA 2012 here: http://drupalcampma.com
2011 (FYI):http://2011.drupalcampma.com/program/sessions
Quickstart
Quickstart is a great pre-configured Ubuntu Linux based site building and development environment. It runs inside VirtualBox, a free virtual machine that can run on Windows, Linux or Mac OS. - Jim Skowyra
Responsive Design, Grids and "themes that do too much (?)" in Drupal Theming
Things can get confusing when trying to figure out whether and how to do a responsive website design, CSS grid layouts, and whether to use themes like Omega to implement. Discussion on these issues, including which is "better", a theme like Omega that does a lot, but stores settings (such a media queries) in the DB, or a bare bones theme where you do much more in code (template files, media queries) etc. - Rick Hood
examples responsive sites:
http://bostonglobe.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/d/responsive-web-design/ex/ex-site-larger.html
http://colly.com/
http://hicksdesign.co.uk/
Newb's Intro To Git
For 10+ years I worked freelance and more or less on my own so had no real need for version control. Now I work with others and had to get used to version control and learn Git. I an give a newb's overview of how to use Git; just what you need to know, not more, not less. - Rick Hood
Comments
Proposed Agenda Item: Intro to Quickstart
Quickstart is a great pre-configured Ubuntu Linux based site building and development environment. It runs inside VirtualBox, a free virtual machine that can run on Windows, Linux or Mac OS. Can't say I'm an expert on this so it can be wide open for discussion. But I'd be glad to get the conversation rolling and do a demo.
Chamber Conflict
I'd love to come but I've got an Amherst Area Chamber of Commerce Networking Function from 5-7ish on the 14th.
Like the VirtualBox/Quickstart idea
Have just been setting up a CMS for a kiosk at the Worcester Ecotarium on a Windows machine. My first thought, following advice I got from the LinkedIn Drupal community, was installing Virtualbox and building on Quickstart.
As I was developing, that platform proved not stable enough, since it would usually crash in-between my work sessions even though it had zero traffic (?!). So I moved it to Wampserver 2 and learned that that platform's GD library does not JPEGs, and we used JPEGs for the picture of every person when they hit the button on the kiosk. So I installed Acquia's Dev Desktop (formerly called DAMP) since I *knew* from starting recently in Acquia support that it supports JPEGs in its Windows. Happy ending is nearly complete -- am just finishing up the site now. But the hard part -- the stack -- is done and I can finish it on my machine.
BTW, is another Drupal camp coming up? I'd love to address Drupalist's just starting out and give something like my presentation from last year: http://crotown.com/content/unsticking-yourself-drupal-developer-googling.... I still get feedback that it is very useful to people. And now I am Acquia's ambassador in front of new initiatives to have Drupal developers put clients sites on the Acquia Cloud platform!
Now that I have acclimated to my job at Acquia -- I am charged up to ramp up my participation in the WMass Drual community.
Cheers,
Steve
Steve Cronen-Townsend | Dev Cloud Support, Acquia Client Advisory Team. Acquia Hosting documentation.
Drupal Camp scheduled for January 22, 2011
Congratulations on the new position! I would love the chance to finally attend your now-famed presentation. We've just opened up for session proposals. http://drupalcampma.com/.
Drupal Camp MA 2012
Added to agenda: Drupal Camp MA 2012
We'll talk about this at the meetup too. Anyone interested in helping out, doing a sessions, etc., please come.
Drupal Camp MA 2012 here: http://drupalcampma.com
2011 (FYI): http://2011.drupalcampma.com/program/sessions
REMINDER - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 @ 6:30 pm
Just a reminder:
Western Mass Drupal Meetup - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 @ 6:30 pm
Location: Webster 102 on Amherst College campus
https://www.amherst.edu/users/H/dhamilton/drupal_meetings
Quickstart link
This is the link I mentioned at the meetup in order to get started with Quickstart and VirtualBox.
http://drupal.org/node/787488
Thanks for the presentation
Jim,
Thanks for the presentation on Quickstart & VirtualBox at the meetup the other night.
I'm definitely going to take a look at NetBeans -- I didn't realize it had PHP source level debugging. I'm hopeful that it might be something I can recommend to novices to get them started with source-level debugging of Drupal sites. Tracing code as Drupal boots, parses the URL, builds the page, and renders it in response to a page request is painful -- but the fastest way for an aspiring Drupalist to get up-to-speed with the Drupal framework.
I've always used Eclipse + PDT and enabled source-level debugging here, but I had just been layed-off when I set it up years ago -- so I had the time to wrangle with it. It's not even something I can recommend to others -- in fact my best recommendation to people has been to invest in something like Komodo where they get PHP debugging out of the box.
Cheers,
Steve
An Advantage of Quickstart
Steve,
Glad to hear you going to look at Netbeans. I wouldn't limit recommendations to novices, though. At the enterprise level, Quickstart and VirtualBox provide an excellent way to get Drupal developers up and running very quickly on a standard toolset, particularly if the enterprise only supports Windows.
There are lots of features I didn't get a chance to cover. But with the documentation that comes with Quickstart (one of it's better features, btw), it's pretty easy to get up to speed on what's available.
Jim