Posted by rsaddington on August 30, 2013 at 10:01am
Start:
2013-09-04 18:00 - 22:00 Europe/London Organizers:
Event type:
User group meeting
Our usual first Wednesday of the month meet up.
Meet at the usual location (Llandoger Trow) for an informal beer and chat about Drupal and other web related topics.
No planned talks for this event, but but as always adhoc presentations or demo's around a laptop etc. More than welcome ;)
At the last meetup we talked about these things
Please signup if you're planning to come along.
Comments
Not able to go tonight
I'm not able to go tonight (at least, not for very long if I do), but as the signups are pretty low this time, I was wondering who else may be going?
Same time, same channel (6pm at Llandoger Trow).
We shall have to see
We don't have a good track-record of actually signing up, usually I have noticed the signups bear no resemblance to who actually turns up. I have a good book either way ;).
I'll be there with my book too
Agree we usually get way more people turn up than the signups - looks to be a nice evening for sitting out in the sun with a beer which is normally a good indicator of turn up :)
The Pearlies are coming
Us Brightpearl lot will be coming along tonight for the first hour or two
was nice to bump into half of you!
I had forgotten (as is my memory) that the Drupal meets are first-wednesday based, and as I was at the Llandogger with some other people last night, it was nice to bump into a handful of you (weirdly, mostly in the gents toilets.. wanna watch out for that). Glad to see you're all well, and, actually, that one of you literally lives in the house opposite me! How weird was that! :D
Quick summary
Firstly apart from hanging around the gents toilets srlawr was also at a Salesforce meetup , which I think occurs the first Wednesday of the month. Might be worth talking to Simon if you do Salesforce things as well as Drupal (opportunity to kill two birds with one stone). Been a bit under the weather so this is late and I have forgotten most. Also can't comment on any conversation I might of missed. These are all opinions that may be wrong and coloured by my own brain.
The meetup was small but perfectly formed, 8 people meant two adjacent tables of four conversing most of the time. Most of the conversation was focused on Drupal related matters and technology, but a bit about important things such as 'Breaking Bad' and the bad science in CSI episodes. This time someone else on the other table dropped a drink, own up who was it? CSI will find you (probably via a reflection on a cigarette butt in a photograph someone took across the street).
Webforms 4.0 anybody upgraded to it from 3.0?? it uses standard tokens rather than custom ones but does it have unexpected side effects?
Phil was discussing how far you can get without having to do any custom coding even on a fairly complex Drupal site. Building is quite involved when using modules like Rules. Often times though you end up having to do the last 10% - 20% in custom code(returning to that in a mo.).
Some discussion on integrating accommodation booking systems but no-one present seemed to have experience doing that on a large scale yet.
Magento(not Drupal) vs Drupal Commerce. Magneto does all the things you are most likely to need in a commerce system, can be pain when you find you need to do something else. Drupal Commerce does about 80% really well then you have to customise (but all customisation should be little easier). As an aside a system like Shopify is likely to do number a things really well but require evilness for customisation.
Lots of talk around WYSIWYG editors in site admin, the pain they cause when abused, whether to try to avoid them entirely (represent structured content in fields of the content type) just restrict them severely or even take control totally and teach users to use Markdown for markup in fields.
Some talk about working hours, and consensus that long hours can work in the occasional burst in small companies (where people have a feel when someone is overload and needs a bit of slack) but kill productivity and motivation in larger organisations when they become the way of life.
Interesting comparison and view points of getting data into Drupal if you can't take a simple route with Feeds module then Migrate is good in some cases but requires some learning and coding. Sometimes if the data is a clean csv type import then it can be easier to just write it yourself either in a little script to run via Drush or a custom module.
Related to above, users/clients that are often Web and computer literate can be very skilled with spreadsheets and sometimes if the type of data fits giving them a spreadsheet based workflow is the best option.
Alex Pott was mentioned, Uk developer doing a lot of good work for Drupal and being funded to some extent by the community via Gittip.