Tampa Meetup #16 - Recap

At last night's Tampa Bay Drupal Users Group (TBDUG) get together, we had about 10 people in attendance and through discussions and an open forum, discussed our plan for future TBDUG meetups, going into 2012.

Topics mentioned for discussion at the meeting:

• A meeting on getting into Drupal programming, specifically the use of hooks and other useful API tools
• A meeting on how to use the Drupal community to answer questions, post issues, find what you are looking for, as well as book/site recommendations for expanding Drupal knowledge
• A meeting on advanced theming topics, including responsive design, setting up a theme from scratch, the ins and outs of the template.tpl.php file and other topics beyond just installing and editing a theme
• A meeting focusing on using, installing and setting up Drush on a local environment and the power of the tool
• A general, "bring your questions" meeting wherein we invite everyone to bring any Drupal problems that they might be having, covering any range of topics, and use the collective knowledge of the group to troubleshoot and solve any problems
• A meeting session focusing on the Omega theme and how to use it and what it brings in terms of responsive design
• A meeting discussing Git and version control, specifically how to setup a repository, common commands, etc
• A meeting covering the Events and Webform modules and how to utilize them on your site
• A meeting discussing Views 3 and the differences between it and previous versions of Views
• A meeting about performance tuning a Drupal site, including improving caching on a server, making sites more responsive for high traffic, and possibly enhancing search through Apache Solr or other tools

Based on the topics above, we have come up with the following tentative session/presenter schedule going into 2012:

• January - Drush - Mike
• February - Omega Theme - Kendall
• March - Drupal Community - Adam
• April - Views 3 - Shawn
• May - Webform/Events - Pam
• June - Advanced Drush - ???

We are still open to volunteers for sessions that are wanted but not assigned to anyone yet, so if anyone (even outsiders from the TBDUG group) is interested in presenting on one of these topics, please feel free to leave a comment below!

We also discussed starting to record our presentations with a video camera for future posting on the tbdug.com website. Adam will bring a camera to meetings to hopefully get the ball rolling with this.

Finally, our newest member Kendall brought forth some great ideas to get the word out about our group, including starting a LinkedIn group, enhancing and promoting the tbdug.com site through better theming and Twitter postings and other good ideas. Welcome and thank you Kendall!

As this was our 16th meeting and we are still going (and growing) strong, 2012 should be a great year for Tampa Drupal users!