Meetup March 2009 - At McDonalds 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?

Javascript, jQuery, and jQuery UI (oh my!)

Question: But I thought this was a Drupal meetup, why are we going to talk about jQuery?
Answer: Because jQuery is cool.

jQuery is the Javascript framework that Drupal ships with. jQuery makes it easy to do things in Javascript, and with jQuery UI you can create cool effects without knowing anything about Javascript (i.e. make tabbed content out of an unordered list and a few divs).

WebmistressM asked a question about tabs in the group today, and coincidentally I've been thinking about speaking about Javascript for the next meetup, so I will be incorporating her question into my presentation.

I'll start off with an introduction to JavaScript and the DOM and then implement tabs just using the DOM. After that I'll give you a brief jQuery introduction, followed by an introduction to jQuery UI, and then I'll tackle the tabs question that WebmistressM asked, using jQuery. We'll create the tabs she wants a couple different ways.

We'll also look at the Drupal.behaviors object and how to register your Javascript with the behaviors object. There are a few benefits to registering your Javascript this way, and we'll talk about it at the meetup.

Second Half

Helior started a club at Victor Valley College ("VVC") for web developers. He has done some amazing work organizing the efforts to get this club started, including rallying up enough students to form the Board of Directors. The club will be about web design in general, and it will get more into what it actually takes to make a web site (i.e. XHTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, etc...). Helior will give an update on what the club is about and when they will be meeting.

We also want to talk about possibly using the VVC facilities for our Drupal meet-ups. The VVC web design club would possibly give us access to do this. Our ultimate goal is to get more people to the Drupal meetup, and by having a web design club at VVC we get more exposure to students that want to enter the industry. Also, the VVC club will talk more generally about web development and not just Drupal, so it's a good place to learn the mechanics of web design.

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.

Resources

Slides to Javascript, jQuery, and jQuery UI (oh my!) 2.2 MB
Audio to Javascript, jQuery, and jQuery UI (oh my!) 19 MB