Suggested Activities for the Central Connecticut Drupal Meetup Group

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Suggest Activities for Future Meetups

This wiki page serves to collect suggestions for presentations, discussions, hands-on exercises and other activities for a future Central Connecticut Drupal Meetup, and allows Meetup Group members to express their interest in giving some presentation or leading some activity at a future Meetup.

  • Should you have a suggestion for a presentation or activity for a future Meetup, please add your suggestion or expand upon an existing suggestion below.
  • Should you wish to give a presentation or lead an activity at a future Meetup, please add your name as an interested presenter or activity leader below.
  • Listed on the wiki page entitled Central Connecticut Drupal Meetup Group are the presentations and activities we have held at previous Meetups. You may suggest that we revisit a past topic or activity, again, by adding your suggestion below.
  • During the Group Business portion of our monthly Meetups, we will review suggested presentations and activities, select presentations and activities for future Meetups, and assign interested presenters and activity leaders to those presentations and activities.

Please visit the wiki page entitled Central Connecticut Drupal Meetup Group for additional information about our Meetup Group.

List of Suggested Activities

Suggested Presentation: Theming

Interested Presenters: Shaun Gorneau, Michael Stenta, Dylan Riordan
Level of Content: Beginner's through Advanced Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

A "theme" is a collection of files that define the presentation layer or "look and feel" of a Drupal site. A theme specifies both the underlying page structure (the regions of a browser page where content can be placed), the cascading style sheets (CSS) that control fonts, colors, etc., and possibly JavaScript (commonly used to create dynamic page elements).

This presentation could address:

  • How do you customize the look and feel of a Drupal site?
  • How do you customize a theme beyond what you can get for readily available themes?
  • How do you get started making your own theme?

Suggested Presentation: Content Construction Kit (CCK)

Interested Presenters: Michael Stenta, Dylan Riordan
Level of Content: Beginner's through Advanced Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

The Content Construction Kit allows a Drupal developer or content creator to add custom fields to custom content types using a web interface.

This presentation could address:

  • How do you create and display content beyond the typical Title/Body type posts in Drupal?
  • Why is the Content Construction Kit (CCK) a key component in creating content, the Drupal way?
  • What modules make up Drupal's Content Construction Kit (CCK)?
  • What features do CCK modules provide and how are those modules configured?

Suggested Presentation: Views

Interested Presenters: Michael Stenta, Dylan Riordan
Level of Content: Intermediate through Advanced Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content are presented.

This presentation could address:

  • How do you create pages in Drupal that query and display content in ways beyond simple most-recently-posted, blog-like listings?
  • How do you use Views to generate custom pages and custom blocks?
  • How can Views be used to generate reports, create summaries, and display collections of images and other content?

Suggested Presentation: Ubercart

Interested Presenters: Michael Stenta, Dylan Riordan
Level of Content: Beginner's through Advanced Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

Ubercart is an e-commerce suite developed for Drupal. It has been designed with the end user in mind, focusing on usability in three key areas: store configuration, product and catalog creation and order administration.

This presentation could address:

  • How can you set up an e-commerce site in Drupal?
  • How do you set up an e-commerce site in Drupal using Ubercart?
  • What are the features provided by Ubercart?
  • How are the features of Ubercart configured?

Suggested Presentation: Triggers, Actions and Rules

Interested Presenters: Dr. Mark A. Friedman
Level of Content: Intermediate through Advanced Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

Triggers are Drupal events such as saving or updating a post, a user logging in or someone viewing a piece of content. Actions are something that is configured to happen after the trigger. For example, an action could redirect a user to a page, send an email notice to administrators or display a special message. The combination of triggers and actions creates an event and responder system for Drupal that allows a developer to heavily customize Drupal, integrate Drupal into other systems, and setup and use enhanced automated workflows without altering Drupal's core code.

This presentation could address:

  • How are flexible content publishing workflows built in Drupal?
  • How are triggers and actions used and configured in Drupal to create workflows?
  • How can Drupal triggers and actions be used to add dynamic features to a Drupal site?
  • What features does the Rules module add on top of the Triggers and Actions modules?

Suggested Presentation: Integration with Web Services

Interested Presenters: Dr. Mark A. Friedman, John Moreau
Level of Content: Intermediate through Advanced Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

Drupal modules, including Triggers, Actions, Rules, Services, Activity Stream, Drupal for Facebook, Twitter and others, allow Drupal to integrate with third-party web services.

This presentation could address:

  • How can Drupal be integrated with different web services available on other sites?
  • How can Drupal be integrated with Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, OpenIDi, LDAP, Email, ...?
  • How can the Services module allow communication between a Drupal site and other web services?
  • How can the Triggers, Actions and Rules module be used to integrate a Drupal site with other web services?
  • How is the Activity Stream module configured to add information from other websites to a Drupal site?

Drupal content (nodes, users, taxonomy and more) to be retrieved and saved through a standard API using pluggable communication mechanisms including XMLRPC, JSON and REST. Developers can also easily create their own web services to expose additional integration with contributed modules or your own custom code.

Suggested Presentation: Multisite

Interested Presenters:
Level of Content: Intermediate Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

Drupal's multisite feature allows you to share a single Drupal installation (including core code, contributed modules, and themes) among several sites.

This presentation could address:

  • How can Drupal be configured to run several sites with a single Drupal installation?
  • What are the tradeoffs between installing multiple Drupal installations and a single installation, multisite configuration?
  • What are the security concerns when running a multisite configuration?

Suggested Presentation: Drupal Installation Requirements

Interested Presenters: John Moreau
Level of Content: Intermediate Content
Length of Presentation: 30 to 60 minutes

Discussion:

A typical Drupal stack includes Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP). How should these components be configured? What hosting services offer the best infrastructure and price for a Drupal installation?

This presentation could address:

  • What are the system and software requirements for a Drupal installation?
  • What are the best hosting services to use for Drupal?
  • What should the software upon which Drupal runs (PHP, Apache, MySQL, ...) be configured to achieve the best performance and highest level of security?
  • How well does Drupal work with alternate installation components? Microsoft IIS? lighttpd? Nginx? PosgreSQL? SQLite?
  • What are the benefits of alternate Drupal distributions? Acquia Drupal? Pressflow?

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