We managed another high-quality meet-up in spite of our brazen lack of a decent agenda going in. Fortunately, the one agenda item we did have on the books was discussing the need to plan our future meet-ups further in advance. The general consensus was that it is difficult to get new people interested when there doesn't appear to be any activity on our groups.drupal.org page nor on our Meetup page. (Of course, those folks that do make it out know that there is usually a good amount of quality content to be had once they get there.) We decided that planning four months out seemed to be a decent and realistic number. Of course, by the end of the meeting, we only had the next two months planned, but hey, it's a start!
For the month of October, we had hoped to get Josh Lockart, creator of the Slim PHP framework and PHP The Right Way, but unfortunately, he will not be able to present at this meetup due to personal reasons. We hope to get Josh on the books again soon. If you haven't, make sure to check out his projects:
http://www.phptherightway.com/
Since Josh can't make this one, Shrop will present "Getting started with Symfony 2 and how it relates to Drupal 8". This will be a great opportunity to learn about a very powerful PHP framework and how Symfony 2 components are being integrated into the core of Drupal 8. Bring your laptop and get help installing Symfony 2 during the meetup.
In November, CharDUG stalwart and co-organizer, Brent Dunn has agreed to give his presentation from DrupalCamps Charlotte and Asheville: A Step-by-Step Drupal Site, in Less than One Hour. Those that caught this presentation at either of the camps said it was great, and the rest of us that missed it felt left out. This will be a very beginner-friendly presentation, so if you a Drupal newbie and have been on the fence about stopping by our meet-ups for fear that it might be over your head, this will be the one to catch!
With the planning portion of the night out of the way, we dove into the deep-end with a topic that was more Drupal-adjacent than Drupal-centric, System Administration. CharDUG founder, Bryan Stalcup, got up and walked us step-by-step through the process of spinning up a new Virtual Machine in a hosting environment. Although the environment he used was on his own server back-end, nearly all of the steps could be used to spin up VMs in commercial environments like Linode, MediaTemple, or anywhere else that provides hosted VPS/VM service. Handy information to have if you are a freelancer considering offering end-to-end service to your clients.
After Bryan's presentation, it became the Night of Lattimore! Long-time CharDUGer, Thomas Lattimore took the stage and proceeded to keep it! (…at least until everyone was too tired to carry on.) He started out talking about the Auto-complete project he had been working on, an entity reference concoction that pulled a long list of titles of other nodes into an auto-complete field on a custom form. Then he moved on to showing us how to update an active project on drupal.org by quickly pushing some updated code and a new tag to the Boron project. And finally, he finished off the night by taking a massive bite out of theming chardug.org, a step that has been long overdue. Interesting stuff for those of us what have never taken a finished HTML/CSS design and made a theme out of it before, and a huge boon for our DUG, who has embarrassingly been sporting Bartik on our home page for the last year or so.
Until we get our group's site fully themed, we are going to use our coding lounge time to finish the job, but after that, we are kicking around the idea of climbing the Drupal Ladder by doing some Learning Sprints. We want to eventually get to the point where we as a group can do Issue Sprints and give back to the community by contributing to Drupal core.
Sound interesting? Let us know what you think!