Our first Santa Cruz Drupal Users Group (SCDUG) meeting was outstanding! I want to thank everyone who came out to NextSpace on Monday evening to talk about Drupal (and Joomla...more below).
Summary
- We had a large group (18+) that included both Drupal power-users and those new to Drupal. Several people were Joomla users interested in what Drupal had to offer. So the main topic of the night was How Drupal and Joomla compare. I'll admit that there is an obvious bias when making this comparison at a meeting of Drupal enthusiasts, but I think we managed to have a realistic discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms (though I admit to some exaggeration when I said I needed electro-shock therapy to help me forget the time I used VirtueMart with Joomla 1.0).
- We heard an update from three Drupalers who were in DC for DrupalconDC a few weeks ago.
- We had some discussion about how someone new to Drupal can find training and help. I promised to poke @mrosas about the plan to offer Drupal training in Santa Cruz.
Future SCDUGs
The last Monday of the month at 7 pm will be our regular meeting day/time. For now, we'll continue to meet at NextSpace, but we may shuffle the venue around on occasion.
For future meetings, we discussed a split-session approach. The first section being an "intro to Drupal" presentation/demonstration of some kind (installation/basic site walk-thru/module set-up, etc.) and second section being a more in-depth how-to or demo showing off something that makes Drupal awesome.
Additionally, we talked about syncing our presentations with the SFDUG (and BDUG as well) on occasion so we can continue discussions about those topics covered online.
Again, I want to thank everyone for coming out, both the Drupal power users those new to Drupal. I think there is a lot we can share and learn together.
Next meeting: Monday, April 27th at 7pm @NextSpace in Santa Cruz. See you then!
Comments
Sounds like a great meeting
I am really sorry I missed this meeting. Sounds like it was well attended and full of enthusiasm.
Don't forget to include case studies as part of your meetings. Your attendees will love the combination of a story and a deep technical dive.
Cheers,
Kieran
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Drupal events, Drupal.org redesign
Case Study + Demo
I got the thumbs up from my project manager to do a demo of the huge site we are building, but she does want to wait until it's a bit more finished, so maybe not for the next meeting. She also wants to do a case study presentation for it as well, though I'm not sure what she has in mind. She was already planning on doing this for the SFDUG (or is it BADUG?) in SF.
The site is for a vacation company, and here's a summary:
Some of the third party modules are:
I also added a comment with a very simple site that I helped my husband with for his UCSC class: http://groups.drupal.org/node/19909#comment-71773
See you guys next time,
Kristen
http://kristen.org
Contact: https://www.hook42.com/contact
Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites: http://www.kristen.org/book
Congratulations
Way to go Rob. We miss you up at BDUG :)
-t
Thanks Tao!
Thanks for the encouragement. Hopefully we can build a group as robust and helpful to the community as BDUG is. I miss coming up to Berkeley to talk Drupal. Hopefully, I can show up at a meeting soon.