Posted by stefanwray on June 6, 2007 at 4:15am
Tonight's Austin Drupal meeting was the first I attended. And I enjoyed it. I'm especially glad to see follow-up meetings set for CiviCRM, Basic Drupal Installation, and Theming -- for this June.
As I said at the meeting, around the country there is interest on the part of public access and community media in Drupal.
Here is a website where some of this development is described:
www.pegspace.org
On this site, it mentions Manhattan Neighbohood Networks' work with CiviCRM.
www.pegspace.org/projects/peg_station_management
Comments
Some common themes
It was a good meetup last night. And there was a definate common thread to a lot of our discussion - drupal is in demand - the vision is becoming a reality - but we need more people, more options, more training, more everything to faciliate it all.
A couple people mentioned it, but I'll pull it out again. The Drupal Dojo is a group on a mission to bring developers up to speed on Drupal, and to answer at least the developer-shortage part of this problem. The Dojo (no relation to the javascript toolkit) is a drupal group: http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo, and has its own site also at http://www.drupaldojo.com/.
I think the notion of solution templates, or standardized, pre-configured drupal sites for some common patterns (npo "web presence", grass roots community site, etc.) would also go a long way to reducing the barriers to adoption and the reduce the expertise and labor required to install, host and maintain a modest site. This is the 80:20 rule - make the common stuff falling-off-a-log easy, leaving the less-common stuff to a skilled developer/administrator/themer as it is today. While the politics of what gets included in such a package might make this difficult for the official drupalistas, its something our smaller group could develop consensus on and put together - we can scratch our own itch.
Sam
best comment of the evening
I think the best comment of the evening was by back-room long-beard (Stefan?).. something to the effect of how our diverse interests and experience levels mashed up in one room with enthusiasm for any topic at hand made getting any one answer accurately addressed in a concise way mirrored what it's like to get support at d.o. The metaphor in action! :D
cheers all-- thanks for another reason to drive in from Bryan