January 2007 Meeting Notes

There was record turn out at the January 25th meeting with approximately 30 people vying for chairs in the Bryght office in Gastown. The longest distance traveled award goes to a certain Toronto based "Bryght guy" joining us via webcam.

There were 4 presentations:
- Contec (Drupal + Mobile Phones)
- BPO Canada
- Dale McGladdery on making a scheduling grid with Views
- Steven Wittens with a demo of his new jQuery widgets

Introductions

A round of introductions and an invitation to share a work, personal, or a project site. Roland immortalized the introductions on video. People were sparse on URLs, but here's what I managed to copy down:
- http://walkah.net/
- http://hatchwebstudio.com/
- http://vancouvermarimbas.com/
- http://www.blogaholics.ca/
- http://imagexmedia.com/
- http://acko.net/
- http://www.vdldodgeball.ca/
- http://www.bmannconsulting.com/
- http://www.vaneats.com/
- http://gatewaysucks.org/
- http://uberbabe.com/
- http://drupaldesigns.com/
- http://www.postcarbon.org/
- http://www.freegeekvancouver.org/
- http://www.contec.com/
- http://www.digitaldoodles.com/

It's not too late, add your URL to the comments if I missed it!

Contec

Roland's notes rock: http://rolandtanglao.com/archives/2007/01/26/contec-drupal-and-mobile-va...

BPO Canada

We were surprised to learn we were hosting the world's largest Drupal service provider. :-) BPO Canada is full service outsourcing company with offices in Canada and India and a staff of approximately 25. They're doing a lot of work in Drupal and are big Drupal fans. They're interested in becoming more involved with the Drupal community and have work they'd like to contribute back to the project. During Q&A, there was an interesting discussion on different methods for handling intellectual property issues around the GPL in contracts.

Dale McGladdery: Creating a Scheduling Grid with Views

Using the theming functionality in the View module you can generate a scheduling grid. An example of this is the Northern Voice conference schedule: http://2007.northernvoice.ca/schedule

Dale did an overview on how this was done and has committed to posting notes. (And finds it incredibly weird writing about himself in the 3rd person)

Steven Wittens: jQuery Widget Demo

Steven did a demonstration of 3 jQuery widgets he's completed:

• Table Header
  A widget that keeps the table header at the top of the screen as the table contents continue to scroll. Allows you to always see the column heading, even if the table length is longer than your browser window.
• Auto-resizing text box
  As you add text to a text box, the text box automatically grows to the length of your browser window. If you manually resize the text box, it will honour the size you've set.
• Teaser Split
  A check box will split the text area for entering the body text into a teaser box and a body box. You can select whether the teaser content is independent of the body content, ala the teaser module, or whether the teaser and body text are joined together to form the node body when the node is fully displayed.

These modules will probably be available in Drupal 6.
Bryght also has a back ported version available on their subversion system.

Question & Answer

How do people manage versioning and staging?
- Boris described how Bryght uses CVS
- Dale has been successful with staging using techniques like this: http://drupal.org/node/59369

Have people found a good method of implementing web based chat?
- There is apparently no generally accepted good solution
- http://www.userplane.com/ was mentioned as an option
- A builtin flash chat client was mentioned as an option, but I didn't catch the name if it was given
- Some solutions involve a host component residing on the webserver and can create a significant performance hit

Announcement

There's an upcoming Vancouver PHP conference on February 12 and 13. Of potential interest:

• Drupal presentations by James Walker and Steven Whittens
• Open Source in Vancouver panel discussion on FOSS and GPL with Zak Greant, Greg Dean, David Ascher, and Bruce Byfield
• Keynote by Rasmus Lerdorf

Information at http://vancouver.php.net/

Post Meeting Quest for Beverages

Our valiant attempt to find a location with enough room, no cover charge, and appropriate choice of beverages for a bit of post meeting socializing was rewarded. A still somewhat sizable group continued with less structured conversation on Drupal and other topics.