Central Florida May, 2009 Meetup - Wrapup

The Florida Drupal Users Group (Central Florida edition) had their monthly meetup on Saturday May 16 with 16 people in attendance.

Andrew Riley (Drupal User ID: Andrew M Riley) talked about the creation of <a href=http://orcabayseafoods.com/">OrcaBaySeafoods.com, a Drupal 6 powered site built by his company Mind Comet.

Damien McKenna (Drupal User ID: DamienMcKenna) gave a presentation on ScubaDiving.com, a new site from Bonnier Corporation (the people behind PopularScience.com, FieldAndStream.com, and some other big Drupal sites. He described his use of installation profiles to help him efficiently build the site - an rebuild it during development on an as-needed basis. This led to an entire installation profile discussion and demonstration. Damien talked about how when writing installation profiles, you need to be careful about the order of things you want to create during installation. For example, he talked about how you can't create menu items for nodes that don't exist yet. So, if your installation profile is automatically creating some nodes, don't try to create menu items for them until they're actually created. He also showed us some Views he built for the site and talked about some of the custom modules he had to build. Finally, he talked about his use (and contributions) to the Views Bulk Operations in the administration area.

Ryan Price (Drupal User ID: liberatr) from DrupalEasy demonstrated the Panels 3 beta for a few minutes before switching over to an ealier alpha version. The point of the demonstration was to start showing some of the new features/challenges of Panels 3. At the very least, everyone has a new appreciation for all the hard work Merlinofchaos does for the community.

Michael Anello (Drupal User ID: ultimike), also from DrupalEasy, gave a walk-through of the most recent Drupal 7 build, showcasing some of the new features that have made it into core so far.

Don't forget to checkout/add/edit our on-going wiki page on upcoming meeting topics: http://groups.drupal.org/node/19676

Our next meetup is scheduled to be a 2-topic, 4-hour event on Saturday, June 20th.

-mike