Somerville Meetup! Wednesday 6:30pm True Grounds coffee house. Informal, discuss new things in Drupal and our use of it!

My very favorite coffee shop. Nice choice! I should be able to attend.

Planning on being there with bells on. I've been looking for a Drupal meetup!

Dani Nordin :: the zen kitchen
http://tzk-design.com

I moved to Somerville recently and will try to attend, although I'm not 100% sure I can make it... Thanks!

I'm actually house sitting right around the corner from that coffee shop, so I'm hoping to be able to swing by. I've been wanting to check that place out, too. Hope it's as good as you say, Moshe!

I'll be there roughly around 8:00, fwiw.

Im sorry I was unable to make it but am going tonight to the Boston Refresh.
http://www.twitter.com/kenyob

True Grounds is a very nice and the staff accommodating, and it began to thin out as our group of 18 or so took over a larger and larger section. They did throw us out a bit after they closed at 9 p.m., though. Also, it's interesting not having a screen to project on, we broke into informal smaller groups for the second half of the meetup.

Here are some scattered notes:

Drupal meetup introductions!

Phil - biodiversity, government work -- how do you represent small groups, link them together
suggested to him the http://groups.drupal.org/local-government

Christefano - just got back from DrupalCampLA. With wife Lee, run Exaltation of Larks

Moshe Weitzman - Drupal developer in Arlington

David Rothstein - works at Acquia - moved to Somerville with fiancee. Former astronomer, doing core work

Peter F - focus on e-learning-- using jquery update, there's a beta version to get Query 1.3.2

Tom Kraft - beginner -- reading books, Lullabot, Linda.com. I want to believe. Questions about CCK, structuring data, when to use Taxonomy, vs intertable linking, versus putting values within CCK. I come more from the design side

Nate T - I develop with whatever tool is appropriate for the job, and many times that's Drupal. Several questions.
I do the blog site for my company, in Drupal. They want to have it so that when someone posts to go to Facebook and Twitter.

Suggestion: Use Twitter module and then use the Twitter app for Facebook. BUT... It's a Facebook page. May still work now. Could also do RSS import into a custom page.

Dani Norden - danigrll - creative, designer, identity person, also able to do Drupal
- Restaurant menu in Drupal?
- Sending a confirmation message with Webform-- can't seem to do this without funky PHP.

Mike Ryan - live off of College Ave over there- work with Moshe at Cyrve
maintain Table Wizard and Migrate modules

Ben Sheldon - work at Human Resources in nonprofit in the day -- but do some development
do some location stuff

Tracy - currently Pearson Education - lamp PHP,

Hiro: Far away from programming - I'm just a musician - every Sunday afternoon you can hear me play - maintain four Drupal web sites for musician organizations
also teach at NE Inst. of Art
student leave their grade open - timer on that - started with 5 minute timer

We talked about this at Jamaica Plain.. no, the JQuery plugin doesn't detect keyboard activity

Chander - heard about Drupal in January of this year - startup person

Plugin manager and the Wordpress example

Christefano: Plugin manager for D7 - has progress recovered?

Dani: Wordpress now has update for itself in core-- you click a button, it backs up your database, installs all the files you need, and says "ok you're done"

I think there'd have to be some education that goes with that-- keeping everything in sites
when i went from wordpress to Drupal, 'logical next step' - huge learning curve trying to remember those things
there's going to be some schmuck somewhere who has everything in their themes folder, and then their theme is missing

Christefano: I have written a script to update Drupal from one version to the next, but it ignores certain files, such as .htaccess

Cleaning up old configuration

Hiro: My first Drupal site is like that, frustrating, it's a mess, a bunch of Views and tables no longer used. At some point I have to clean them up, and I don't know how.

Christefano: There's a module for that. There's http://drupal.org/project/views_audit (Drupal 5 only right now)

[Agreement that something that kept track of whether a module is actually used or not would be great.]

Install Drupal via command line core patch

David Rothstein: Patch that I got in a few weeks ago, sponsored this patch to install Drupal by the command line
array of the installation settings (what you would type in each time) and Drupal 7 will install itself for you. Drush will surely build off this.

Assigning classes to blocks

[This is a reprise of a major demand of the Design4Drupal movement]

block class module - let's you assign a class

Moshe: if top-notch themes have their way, and I hope they do, Fusion will be the base
and Skinr - which does block class and then some - will be standard

Prosper - the Acquia Ubercart theme, based on Fusion
Fusion 960 grid theme
adds Skinr capability

as a designer feel people are mad at me for wanting to do these things [in the issue queue]

I use twitter for this a lot too -- [get better answers faster, often]

Christefano: this is a culture clash-- there's an established culture in Drupal, old and gnarled but also brand new
on the other end, as a developer, i don't know enough about design and CSS
one of the reason i wanted to go to Design4Drupal was to learn more about the design culture

Dani: The point is I want to give a block a class that makes sense, and I don't want to hunt around for the name
This is something that's overlooked

Problem is just as much with contrib themes.

Moshe: There are a few reasons why developers might get upset. One: if they hear a tone of entitlement from a person who isn't paying-- "I should not have to do this" -- developer response, go fly a kite.

Dani: As a designer
I'm saying I shouldn't have to go to the command line
not saying you should do it
that's not my role
I make it look good

Drupal as Developer's playground

Michael:
People are generally very helpful
but Drupal is absolutely, positively, a developer's tool
professional programmer for over 10 years, but new to Drupal

[Two people at the meetup mentioned spending about three days on the same thing-- trying to find the dependency 'content' when installing another module. And finding out that content, the required dependency, is in fact CCK.]

Lee: Essential thing about Drupal is it's really fun for developers. It wouldn't be nearly as cool if it weren't gratifying for developers. If the community needs to grow, there needs to be an acceptance that there are people like me that have to be able to work together.

Moshe: At some point Drupal isn't the answer -- things built on Drupal are. Like Open Atrium. It's a Drupal app, an internet app on top of Drupal.

Contributing to core.

Moshe: just do patch reviews [very valuable]

^{ben, agaric}