Berkeley Drupal Group - May Meeting and on-going

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starbow's picture
Posted by starbow on May 11, 2007 at 5:51pm
Start: 
2007-05-23 12:00 - 13:30 US/Pacific

Greeting East Bay Drupalers,

We have bowed to the near universal desire for a day-time meeting. Future group meetings will be at lunch time (12-1:30pm), in the same location on campus (HMMB 290). The trade off is that the dates are a little more complicated. Here are they are for the rest of the year:

May 23rd (Wed - Next Meeting)
June 20th (Wed)
July 25th (Wed)
Aug 22nd (Wed)
Sept 27th (Thur)
Oct 25th (Thur)
Nov 29th (Thur)

My current thought for the structure of the meetings is to keep what evolved at the first meeting: a mix of introductions, an open questions and answers period, and one or two short presentations. So, if you would like to give a presentation, or propose a topic, or have an idea for a better meeting structure, please speak up. I would love to see a mix of levels from "welcome to Drupal" to "here is how a ninja does it", with some "this is so cool, check this out" thrown in for good measure.

I am also creating a website to support the group (and to try and encourage Drupal usage at UC Berkeley).
http://drupal.citris-uc.org
It is still very much a work in progress. If you have ideas for this site, or want to help out maintaining it, let me know.

Food: We will have something lunchy. Please RSVP if you would like food.

Directions to 290 Hearst Mining (annotated map is on the website):
Map of the campus - http://www.berkeley.edu/map/maps/large_map.html
This room is located next to CITRIS headquarters, so you can use these directions: http://www.citris-uc.org/about/visitors/directions
Parking can be a challenge around campus, and even more so during the day. The closest area to look is around Hearst & Euclid. Also, Hearst Mining is about a 15 minute walk from the downtown Berkeley BART station.

Categories:

Comments

Meetup this Wednesday

Posted by ChrisBryant on May 22, 2007 at 5:05am
ChrisBryant's picture

Hi Tao and Everyone,
I'm looking forward to the meetup on Wednesday. Let me know if I can help out with anything. RSVPing for lunch if there is something veg friendly. :-)

One idea we could also do is plan for some lightning talk style of presentations if people are into that.

Chris

ALIAN DESIGN

--
Gravitek Labs

Thank you for setting this

Posted by jpsalter on May 22, 2007 at 7:03pm
jpsalter's picture

Thank you for setting this up. See you all there.

Food? I'm an omnivore and happy to help out - please let me know what I can do.

--Jason

RSVPing

Posted by Seth Schneider on May 23, 2007 at 12:13am
Seth Schneider's picture

RSVPing for lunch if there's something vegetarian.

i'm there

Posted by dww on May 23, 2007 at 12:39am
dww's picture

i moved the meeting for my day job, so i'll be there. re: food -- i eat anything (especially newbies). ;) should be fun!

Food stuff

Posted by drob on May 23, 2007 at 12:40am
drob's picture

We'll be bringing food. Suitable for veggies of course. So far it looks like everyone would be happy with veggie - so let us know if you must have meat! :)

Yahh Food

Posted by scoobee on May 23, 2007 at 4:15am
scoobee's picture

I would love to have something lunchy tomorrow. Personal request to keep newbies off the menu though.

proposals for the agenda

Posted by dww on May 23, 2007 at 9:31am
dww's picture

a few ideas that have popped into my head:

  • as mr. AJAX forms himself, let's hear starbow's opinions on FAPI 3 (http://drupal.org/node/138706).
  • i could give an intro to the drupal.org testing install profile (http://drupal.org/project/drupalorg_testing).
  • let's roll a core patch together: the new variable API (http://drupal.org/node/145164). we'll briefly discuss the 2 proposed APIs (a simple array of name/values vs. the full FAPI-style array strucutre suitable for hook_alter()) and then get hacking. i'll write the code for variable_init() that implements the new hook. interested parties can just split up the core modules and each work on porting one to the new API. we'll roll all our changes together into a single patch, test it all together, and then post it to the issue queue. someone could also work on writing a plugin to aid this task for the coder.module, which we could then use to speed up the work if it was completed. it'd be a great learning experience, it's easily parallelized work, and we'd accomplish something useful and cool to benefit D6, too.
  • let's hear if there are any other patches people are going to push for in D6.

i'm thinking the roll-a-core-patch thing should go near the end of the agenda, so if folks weren't into it, they could just leave.

other suggestions welcome... let's make this a useful gathering, beyond the benefits of meeting each other and networking.

thanks,
-derek

Cool

Posted by starbow on May 23, 2007 at 3:35pm
starbow's picture

Hi Derek,

Well, I just got back into town and haven't had time to dig into FAPI3, past my initial reaction to Eaton announcement, which was "Hell yes!"

I want to keep some time for the intros and open Q&A so there is value for the complete newcommers, but as far as I am concerned you can have the rest of the time to run with your ideas - they all look great.

-t

Wow!

Posted by starbow on May 24, 2007 at 12:56am
starbow's picture

That was quite a turn out. I counted 28 of us. Thanks to everyone who showed up, and especially everyone that answered questions and shared info. And thanks again to Dan for the food.

Since this was our first day time meeting, it kinda felt like our first meeting over again. We are still getting a feel for what is the most useful way to present information. I hope it is working for everyone. I updated the resources page a bit, and added a contact form over at http://drupal.citris-uc.org/ so let me know if you have suggestion.

By next month's meeting the D6 code freeze will have been in effect for a couple of weeks, so I am hoping someone will want to talk a bit about that.

Thanks!

Posted by Seth Schneider on May 24, 2007 at 1:31am
Seth Schneider's picture

A big thanks to Tao for organizing this and to those who helped pull it together, including the food from Civic Actions.

As I mentioned at the meeting, my organization recently released an RFP for a CMS implementation, and we'd welcome proposals from Drupal developers because Drupal would be a good match with our needs. I've posted it in this group at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/4196