Last night we had an astounding restart to our drupal meetups. About 15 (someone correct me if they actual counted) drupalistas of all stripes were there. The cafe was very accommodating and gave us a big table in the back to do our meetup. Here's a list of the presentations. For those of you who presented, can you please add in the details?
Presentations:
Drupal and iPhone - Vince Youmas
Vince did a great presentation on the iphone and various options for getting your content on the iphone. There were three options he spoke about to get it done. The first was about notifications on the iphone. Basically the lack of background tasks in the iphone has been improvised by apples servers pushing any new data from the apps server. Drupal can easily fill this app server role by the miriad of modules that can be put together and sent via the services module. Another approach talked about was using the phone tools module. This module allows you to set separate themes for various mobile web browsers. Lastly Vince spoke about phone gap, which while not drupal specific, is a framework that hooks into modern phone OS systems, such as iPhone, android and blackberry and gives your app access to niceties such as GPS, camera, compass, etc, via javascript, avoiding the whole language specifics for each platform.
Backing up Drupal to S3 - John Studdard (Big Couch Media)
John brought up the great Backup and Migrate module which allows automated backups to be created via cron. To top it off he created a script for automagically sending off his site to S3 for some nice backup redundancy. (please share, John!)
Update: Here is a link to the Script I used http://www.ericnagel.com/wp-content/uploads/backup-src.phps
Table Wizard and Migrate (Mapstraction bonus!) - Michael Anello (Drupal Easy)
Mike Anello of Drupal Easy fame came over and gave us a great tour of the table wizard module. A module that allows you to bring in data from static files or even from another un-drupal mysql database and map these out automagically to a views! Afterwards he showed how using the Migrate module, those entries could be imported to nodes using a previously set up content type and mapping the data fields to the node/cck fields. The example he used was csv data about earthquakes and for a big finish he displayed the imported data via the mapstraction module which easily hooks into views to create great looling maps in a number of third-party mapping sites!
Next Meetup:
If you have a great idea for something to present at the next meetup, add it in here so we can organize a schedule.
Unfortunately I had to get going after the out-tros, so I didn't find out when the next meetup was agreed upon. I'm assuming the third monday of the month (Sept 21) at Claudia's Cafe? For those who stayed, please correct this if it's not.