Spokane Day-time Learn/Co-Work Group Dec 10

What we discussed at the meeting:

• Contributing to the Drupal 8 User Guide:
  https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide
• Making PDFs from Drupal - Jon suggests the
  https://www.drupal.org/project/print
  module. This works with some software that has to be installed on the server. Jon used "wkhtmltopdf" (see link on the Print module project page).
• Cron (scheduler) -- Drupal has "cron" processes that need to run periodically. Modules set these up., and you need to "trigger" them by "running Drupal cron".

  There are two ways to trigger Drupal cron:
  - Use the Cron setup at admin/config/system/cron -- this will piggy-back on a normal web page request (slowing it down) and trigger cron
  - Set up a Linux cron job on the server that pings a particular Drupal URL and triggers cron that way. See https://www.drupal.org/cron for how to do that, and find the "cron" section on your hosting account to set it up. To find your particular Drupal URL, go to admin/config/system/cron and it will show it to you. YOu can also turn off the auto-cron there.

• Jon wanted to have more fine-grained control over Cron jobs in Drupal. Try one of these modules:
  https://www.drupal.org/project/elysia_cron
  https://www.drupal.org/project/ultimate_cron
• Some good things about the Drupal project, as compared to other open-source software:
  - Not too many abandoned modules (there is a process in the community for people taking over as maintainers)
  - The Security team and its processes for dealing with security issues https://www.drupal.org/security
  - The Drupal Code of Conduct https://www.drupal.org/dcoc and the diversity it supports
  - Birds of a Feather gatherings at DrupalCon (for interest groups, like Drupal for Museums)
  - Local groups and the networking connections they make
• How to put "Live Help chat" into a Drupal site:

  - You'll need to set up a chat server account first, probably a 3rd-party service, that will notify the people on the company end that someone wants to chat. Shawn uses Zopim (which is free if you only need one person to receive the chats, and fairly inexpensive for more users). There are plenty of others as well.
  - That chat program will probably provide JavaScript code. Put it in a Drupal "block" and display it on your site.

• Had a discussion about whether we should try to get more people to come to our Spokane user group meeting, and how to do this. Some thoughts that were brought up:
  - Can we attract younger people to keep the group going?
  - Can we exhibit at tech fests? Tried to get involved at SFCC but that didn't work out...
  - Do we actually need more people? Some of us are happy with the group as it is.
  - We could contact the people who are signed up as members on groups.drupal.org of the Spokane group, and see what would bring them to the meetings.
  - College outreach? Shawn is on a curriculum committee, but it is an uphill battle to get people to think about this.
  - Who is the audience for the meetings?
  - We could do a Drupal Global Training Days
  https://www.drupal.org/global-training-days
  First step is to find a place to host it; Shawn and Jose will look into this and we'll discuss in January. Would be April 8-9; Friday for half-day workshop; Saturday for full-day workshop.
• Would like to have a demo of how to build sites in Drupal 8 - maybe in January?
• It is not currently possible to migrate a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8 -- the migrate framework is not ready. You can in principle migrate Drupal 6 to 8, but the Drupal 8 versions of add-on modules may not be ready yet.
• Drupal Batch API - for running processes that might time out:
  https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!form.inc/group/batch/7

  Also check out the list of functions that call batch_set() in Drupal 7 core:
  https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!form.inc/function/calls/batch_set/7
  (skip the ones with "test" in the name).