We had a very productive November meeting that culminated with finally launching our snazzy new theme designed by David Leininger, and styled by Thomas Lattimore on chardug.org. So long, Bartik!
The meeting got started with an off-site excursion to Boardwalk Billy’s for dinner. Once we were adequately stuffed with some good eats, we headed back to the Classic campus to get to the meeting portion of the night, which we did by having Shrop recap the “Learn to Build a Website with Drupal” introductory class we offered the previous Saturday. In short, it was a success! We looked over the survey results which were entirely positive and full of excellent suggestions for where we can go with our next offering of the class on January 12, 2013.
One of question we had coming out of the intro class was, “Where do we take our students from here?” and the answer we came up with was the Drupal Ladder. Scott Deeter gave a brief overview of what the Drupal Ladder is and what how charDUG can get involved. Members planning on attending the December Drupal Round Table were given a homework assignment: getting signed up on learndrupal.com and getting as far up the ladder as they can on their own. The idea behind the assignment is that when we reconvene, we will be able to know where each other stands on the ladder and will be able to break out into smaller groups till we all get up to speed and committing back to core.
Shrop took the lead once more to talk about his workflows when working on contrib projects. He talked about cloning the git repository for the project he will be working on into one folder and the using drush qd to create a clean, temporary instance of the latest stable version of Drupal in another folder. He then creates a development branch to work on using git checkout -b development_branch_name, leaving the master branch to diff his patch against. Then, from within the sites/all/modules folder of the drush qd instance of Drupal, he creates a symbolic link to the module repo with ln -s /path/to/module/repo. The end result being the same as if he had downloaded the repo straight into the sites/all/modules folder, with the added benefit of not destroying the module repo when he gets rid of the drush qd instance.
Very useful ProTips from the Shrop!
After Shrop, Thomas took the lead to talk us trough getting the new theme finished. There were a few remaining issues that he walked the group through allowing others to tear into and resolve them. That cleared the way for Thomas to click the magic “Enable and set default” link and take the theme live. Now we can proudly share it and tell everyone about our killer responsive site, and no longer have to hang our heads in shame when asked for the URL.
With that, we finished the night of with a discussion about the remaining site architecture choices. The plan is to enable Mollum to keep the spammers at bay and to move over to the hardened Guardr distro of Drupal 7. We also talked about the need for a project management tool to allow us collaborate on chardug.org-specific issues. Shrop barely missed a beat before offering to stand up an Open Atrium instance to serve as a temporary PM space till we could stand up projects.chardug.org on the proper server. For the time being, the temp OA instance is at projects.shropentdev.net but will migrate once p.c.o goes live.
Be sure to check back at chardug.org more often. Now that the site is much more presentable, it is going to feature much more prominently in to how we market the group and how we share with the world at large.