August 1st was our first meeting since DrupalCamp Charlotte and considering our last meeting the Wednesday before the camp was entirely dedicated to preparation for the camp, we had a lot of pent-up stuff to talk about! Bryan Stalcup got the night started with a DrupalCamp Charlotte 2012 wrap-up. The CharDUG members shared their notes on things we thought worked and things we thought needed changing. Overall, we felt the camp was a success, and judging by the feedback we got, so did most of our attendees. Everyone seemed to agree that both the camp and the LinuxFest would be better served by spreading out over the course of two days rather than keeping all Drupal-related content relegated to Sunday. We were also unanimous about a need for better lunch options, and discussed some steps we might take to make that better next year.
Brent Dunn got up and walked us all through the survey feedback we received during the camp. Among the responses was a call for having BoFs. The decision to nix those was a last minute one made based on the number of high-quality presentations submitted in the lead up to the event. But we missed the BoFs too! You can rest assured we will make sure they happen next year!
We also agreed that we would continue to grow our relationship with the good folks at SouthEast LinuxFest.
Once we concluded the wrap-up portion of the night it was time for presentations. Scott Deeter kicked it off with a presentation on a recent project he did converting a client's static site into Drupal. The first half covered the case he made to convince the client that switching to Drupal was the right decision. The second portion covered steps taken during the transition and interesting lessons learned along the way.
Mark Bellaire then gave a presentation on his recent patch to the Views Natural Sort module. His patch uses some regex magic to add numeric sort functionality to the already existing alphabetical sort found in the current module.
The final presentation for the night was given by Mark "The Shrop" Shropshire who walked us through setting up and using Xdebug within SublimeText 2 and how to use them in Drupal development. Xdebug is an amazingly useful tool, and the fact that it can be used from within ST2 makes both technologies that much more useful for Drupal developers.
Although the group started to dissolve a little around eleven o'clock, some die hards hung in there worked on smaller projects. Brent got the camp site archived to 2012.drupalcampcharlotte.com. Shrop got the awesome new chardug.org theme, designed by our own David Leininger, committed to GitHub, while simultaneously providing Thomas Lattimore with the best "MAMP Begone" service money can buy! All in all, it was one of our better meetups.