Durban Drupal Group

Oh - we meet once a month on the first Wednesday for the user group and once a month on the third Wednesday for the DASA meeting here in Johannesburg. Once you have a date set, remember to create an event here on the groups, but also on Meetup.com.

A few years ago I started engaging myself in the world of websites and being online. What a shocker it was for me as a business owner to have gone through 3 developers, R35,000 in cash and still had NOTHING to show for it.

Just there and then I decided to resort to my failsafe action and that is to do the job myself. Coming from an IT background it took me not too long and after many nights of research I decided to ventured on the daunting task of trying to teach myself Drupal, which was not well supported in SA at all, but nevertheless I pushed on. Now, many months later I can kinda help myself to setup fairly functional sites. Because it was mostly to do stuff for myself and not make it my business, I approach some hardcore individuals and companies to help me out on some projects but it is their "Bread and butter thing" so it was a dead end for me.

The reason for me to have agreed on starting a Durban Group is mainly to help others like me, promoting an awesome open-source platform, become more knowledgeable and to have personal access to industry guru's and therefore breed young skilled developers to take on the daunting task of producing quality projects in SA.

I hope my objectives and that of the core community is aligned. That way it would be a pleasure taking my own time and utilising it to the benefit of others.

Not is any point-and-click way that I can think of off-hand. But a scraper may well do it. Custom code of course.

Checking in here does mean you check in where Drupal happens. Unless Groups.Drupal.org moves to another system, it's a good idea to check in here anyway for any serious Drupalers. There's more than just the South African group on here and every Drupaler's interests will vary, so no use aggregating all or a pre-selected list of items to another social system.

I did think of writing one though, but more specific to our needs: To aggregate attendees that confirm attendance through this SA group and through meetup.com so organizers can get a better idea of how many people will attend events. I know the CT guys use eventbrite (though it's got no Drupal events listed for SA right now) and you seem to prefer Facebook. So maybe in future (and I mean months ahead looking at my current program) such a system would bring those in too.

It's good that we have so many ways to tackle things and some are better than others for different groups of us. But I think it's at least important to cross-post to this group for events. It's where (correctly) drupal.co.za point to and where an outsider would expect to find SA information.

In my time keeping away from local social Drupal interaction due to the commercially hijacked nature I felt it had, apparently there was two camps held. So I'm sure the human resources are there.

Some of those very resources may be a little overstretched right now, but since I'm sure a camp takes a few months to prepare, they may very well become more available by that time.

Maybe create a task on the asana task tracker for DASA, assign it to yourself and we'll gather comments there on how to support it. Then create a separate discussion topic here on Groups.Drupal.org for it too with some of the talking points like national and more specific location, who will be prepared to travel where, sponsors, pricing, topics, date etc.

I just want to give credit to Bomoko, he has been helpful in our local FB group and because this Durban group is but in the infancy stage we need all the help we can get. Big ups to you Bomoko.

This is the kind of spirit that others, those that are not use to this community, have to see so they can become part of the Drupal family.

Hi,
Do you still have a Drupal group meeting in Durban?
Thanks.

It's so awesome to discover Drupal once you worked with Joomla! hey. The last time I actually developed with Joomla! was when they just forked from Mambo. Only maintained a few Joomla! sites since then.

The upcoming Drupal 8, if you may have followed some of it, will be so much better still that I really can't see how anyone will still voluntarily choose Joomla! over it. On the fast brochure ware side of the market where I used to still recommend Joomla! to friends that just want to learn to put their own site together have also been eroded by so many new and amazing frameworks.

You're welcome to fly up if you can make it and come visit a Johannesburg user group meet-up until we can get the Durbs one off the ground again. It should also give some insight into how a great meet-up works which will in turn help the Durban one once you attend... or help organise? Helping organise doesn't have to be that much work: For example, just someone posting and maintaining the meetup.com notification helps a lot. Someone to buy some samies, someone to bring a few beers and yes, someone to put it all together and host (which, granted, can be a bit more work but with several people helping out that won't be too troublesome). Perhaps think of a talk, 30min or so, comparing Joomla! and your new found Drupal for the first talk and come try it out here in Johannesburg - it's very social and laid back, so not a formal speech-talk.

We're just still busy with getting the Cape Town meet-ups rebooted, but as soon as we're done there, we have Durban in mind for some assistance - hopefully we'll learn a lot from the Cape Town organisation and will be able to tackle drubs better.

On our agenda: https://github.com/DrupalAssociationSA/InternalDocumentation/blob/master...

Hey Bruce,

We have so many parents in the groups now and there's both plans being made and plans already quite along for more parents ;-) Family comes first and it's only by relying on each other than we are able to fill in the schedule enough to make some progress. Often parents can't make it to meetings and meet-ups and only know that at the 11th hour.

Lee's working on virtualising the meet-ups, so they are often live on YouTube now. We'll probably have to fund raise a bit more to get better camera, microphone and computer equipment for that and be sure that it works every time before we start promoting the live sessions a bit more. They are also interactive: I attended the last DASA meeting from home because of a flu.

Some requirements on my time, lovingly and always available to my daughter and granddaughter (new) are also partly what kept me from making it to Durban this year already for a meet-and-greet.

Much of our work also comes from international agencies. Nicely does away with tender documentation and bidding process and allows one to spend all that time on building better products. Also seriously cuts down on meetings.

One thing I noticed when looking around at KZN, Drupal companies are hard to find. But Drupal is just a tool, and web development companies there are all over the place. So I gathered a list of 30 companies and their contact details. The thinking is to invite them to the first meet-up and to make the topics non-Drupal web development with just one Drupal topic each time. That should allow the interested parties to migrate to Drupal if it is a tool that suits their requirements while also keeping any Drupal attendees well informed about other web topics.

In Johannesburg we often talk about non-Drupal topics. The last meet-up the two primary talks were about Varnish (by Lee) and then a lawyer (Ravick) discussed intellectual property and answered questions for us. The one before Kagiso walked us through his very first exposure to a computer at breaks in high school in a rural area to his modern job in Johannesburg and the pitfalls and excitement along the way, then Andre presented a high-level overview on MVC. So we've gone two months without explicit Drupal talks, even while they were tied back to Drupal often in questions and relevance.

Slides: https://kagisom.github.io/starting-with-web-dev
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/kagisoM/starting-with-web-dev

Slides: https://andre-artus.github.io/mvc-slides
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/andre-artus/mvc-slides

We're trying to make the slides as complete as possible and share them on GitHub so that other national meet-ups' potential speakers can just fork them and use them there too.

Remember to sign up to the meetup.com group for Durban http://www.meetup.com/Drupal-Durban/ so that, if there's a meet-up or meet-and-greet organised there, you will receive an e-mail notification. I'm currently managing that group, but it will likely be handed over to a local host once things get going. The more people we can get to sign up to the group beforehand, the more likely that we'll be able to get things off the ground quicker from the very first meet-up.

Heck, if enough sign up, say 30 or so, the whole Durban meet-up may just bootstrap itself!