We had another successful meetup this month, with thirteen members on-site and two more via Google Hangout. The meeting kicked off with two MASSIVE pizzas and some good conversation, before Shrop took the dais. At the September meetup, Shrop outlined some changes that were in the pipe for a few of our meetings, and at this month's, he covered how well those changes fared. Changing the LunchCamp to a once-a-month schedule and relocating it to The Saloon at the NC Music Factory showed some real promise. We are hoping for some better attendance at the next one! The Module Development 101 turned out to be well-attended and folks seemed to get a lot value out of it.
After the intro, Thomas Lattimore got up to start his portion of the presentation on "Managing Drupal Configurations Like a Boss". Much of his focus was on the Features module, showing that in spite of its initial intent as a tool for building reusable features (like a photo gallery, or a blog) it had morphed over time into be a great way to get configuration in to code. Features will be reverting back to its original intent in Drupal 8, since 8 will natively keep its config data on the file system in .yml files.
Shrop then came back to discuss his portion: distributions. He went over when and where they make sense and why they are a good idea, how to go about including your own features in a distribution, what the Profiler module is and how it works, and how to leverage the power of the hook_update_N function for fun and profit. Another interesting concept Shrop introduced was glue modules as a means to adding additional functionality to your features or sites.
And last but not least, a new tradition got started after the end of the more formal part of the meetup: post-meetup beers at the Flying Saucer. Five of the thirteen attendees gathered at the Saucer to chat about Drupal, beer, development, and whatever else came to mind. Be sure to put some time in your schedule for the post-meet after next month's meetup and come join us for a pint!