Well, it has finally happened.
The Drupal community in Ireland has had its first meetup.
Some photos here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/93398557@N00/sets/72157594477020230/
We had 8 attendees, and a great deal was learnt by all.
Vincent will have a write up of the details later.
I want to thank John Breslin from DERI for organising the meeting room.
It was fantastic to have such a facility.
We're already looking forward to the next meetup.
We plan to have a 'local' meetup in about 3 months time, and then go for a National meet up again in the summer.
The local meetup will probably be some evening during the week, more on that later.
John has given us the provisional green light to have another Drupal Ireland meetup in DERI in 6 months time, should we want to.
So This is putting out the call to Drupal Users across Ireland.
Do you want to have the next Drupal meet-up in your City?
If so, make it happen, and we'll see you there.
If not, we'll see you in 6 months time in Galway
Later
Alan
Comments
Yep, It was really good. I
Yep, It was really good. I learned a lot. I've already started using the views module on my home page following the talk about it and I've got lots of other things to check out from the other talks.
The details(!)
I concur with Alan and Aidan - it was a very informative session. Topics included, at one level of detail or another:
During the course of the discussion a variety of sites based on Drupal were used to demonstrate and explain features, functions and methods. These included:
I used my sandbox site to demo the v5 multi-site set-up, as a 4.7 site with ACIDFree and a pre-production site to set up views. Once the pre-production site gets released I might post the URL into the drupal.org showcase. Feel free to add links to other sites we touched on in this posting thread.
Other stuff
As usual at face-to-face meetings a lot of the value emerged at the edges. I found some interesting stuff out about tips to encourage lurkers to post, open web design (.org), PDF printing, how vibrant the Drupal community is in Galway (and how it will soon be strengthened with AidanF arriving soon), and finally Alan's plans to create a multi-million euro empire as an e-commerce entrepreneur using Drupal.
Since then
I've made use of the information I gleaned on views, taxonomy and its related modules, and I hope to get to grips with some of the javascript stuff I saw.
Since the comments from Alan on links sometimes breaking between pre-production and live sites I've reconfigured my laptop XAMPP install to make it into a more robust development platform. I'm now using apache redirects and virtualhosts in conjunction with host file mods to test a website with its public address.
(excuse the vvvs - stops the URLfilter from inappropriate translation) i.e. the client will eventually have vvv.hersite.com and the primary development and content loading goes on at vvv.mysite.com/hersite
Now I can now copy the development site to my laptop and test the Drupal installation with a pseudo-address of vvv.hersite.com (pointing to my own laptop of course). All the kinks can be ironed out before I move to the production site on a hosted server which will be reached through the real vvv.hersite.com
Looking forward to the next one.
This meeting was definitley
This meeting was definitley interesting and useful. Already looking forward to the next one.
Regarding the comments/mailing list working together mentionned by John, I just found a screencast explaining a method using organic groups. When a post is sent on the website, the users get an email and can reply directly to the email. The reply is inserted automatically in the thread on the website.
http://www.zacker.org/magic-groups-screencast
Alan presented some stuff about the GMap module. Here is a screencast example using GMap, Location, CCK and Views. A list of locations were imported from a spreadsheet on to a map.
http://www.zacker.org/screencast-drupal-mashup-machine
Also watched the What's new in Drupal 5 screencast. Amazing. A must to see. It appears that many issues I was facing before in 4.7 have been addressed. http://drupal.org/videocasts/whats-new-in-5
More cool features of Drupal to learn easily in the other screencasts : http://drupal.org/node/63155
The jQuery website has recently been improved with more and more plugins and documentation everyday : http://jquery.com/
Wanna nosey into the next meetup
Am no programmer but mad keen to sit there listen and learn from the experts
Oh and maybe buy a jar or two
So am i in ???
Good to have one more
Hi there hooperman.
Myself and Stephane were in Barcelona for Drupalcon [where Stephane turned into a core hacker, but that's another story].
There was a few guys there from Dublin, and one from Belfast, and there was talk of a Drupal Ireland meetup in a few weeks time.
It will get mentioned on this group if we do get it together.
Later
Alan