Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup -- January 12th

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maristgeek's picture
Posted by maristgeek on January 3, 2012 at 9:30pm
Start: 
2012-01-12 18:00 - 20:00 America/New_York
Organizers: 
maristgeek
Event type: 
User group meeting

Where: Room 205, Old Laundry Building, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie
When: January 12th, 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:

  • Introductions
  • Sharing of Cool Modules
  • Talk: Vonn New will be talking about zip code proximity searching.

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.

Categories:

Comments

I've got a new module that

Posted by sdague on January 11, 2012 at 6:20pm
sdague's picture

I've got a new module that adds some nice UI bits to date fields. Will be looking for opinions on a module name at the meeting.

The Notes

Posted by maristgeek on January 27, 2012 at 2:46am
maristgeek's picture

Sean Dague started the month off talking about his new module, Smart Dates, which the group helped name. Smart Dates helps make entering To and From fields for Calendar entries much more sane. With the module enabled changing the From date will smartly advance the To date as well. Sean went through the various specific use cases, but if you have a site on Drupal 6 that involves dates you should certainly look into the module.

Vonn continued the meeting by showing the steps involved in implementing proximity searching on your sites, based on instructions found here. Most of the setup comes with just setting up GMap, Location and Views, but you will have to go through the extra step of grabbing a zipcode table that contains latitude and longitude coordinates which gets discussed at http://drupal.org/node/566792. Having implemented GMap and Location before I was pleasantly surprised that proximity searching beyond that is essentially some extra views.

Beyond that was random miscellaneous conversation and fun:

  • Ben shared his appreciation for Absolute Messages, citing confusion when being new to a site whose messages where places toward the center of the page. With Absolute Messages you can achieve having messages appear in a horizontal bar on the top of your pages, much like on a Stack Exchange site.
  • Thor showed that he cannot figure out how to use his phone. Much guffawing was had by all.
  • There was general conversation about the Geolocation API of HTML5. If you want to get creeped out see it in action at http://html5demos.com/geo.
  • Sean and Thor haven both been dealing with forums in Drupal were discussing the options available for notifcations.

Ben has finally met his new boss who does not mind the meetups happening at Vassar College. So the next meetup will be Thursday February 9th. This will be a Show and Tell month so be sure to have something to share with everyone.

Mapping with Drupal

Posted by maristgeek on January 27, 2012 at 2:51am
maristgeek's picture

Ben also mentioned O'Reilly Media's new Mapping with Drupal. For anyone who is interested in dealing with mapping in Drupal you should check it out, especially since you can pick up the ebook for $9.99.

Remember to buy all your dead-tree Drupal books from http://drupal.org/books.