June 11 Denver Drupal User Group Meeting

This meeting went pretty well. Most of the folks found the announcement from the Drupal.org homepage, and a couple from the groups.drupal.org/denver. We had varied experience from "never even used it" up to "built a couple sites with it". And perhaps most importantly, Rick and Adam from HelpMeRick came all the way down from Grand Junction - 3.5 hours.

As usual there was more interest in hiring than in finding work. This time I mentioned the position from Laura S from pingV and there were several people looking for "theme" work.

We tried a new format similar to BarCamp where everyone stated what they'd like to learn about at the meeting and then we tried to break off into groups to discuss all those topics. The major topics that people were interested in are listed below with some of the discussion and some handy links.

Tabs and Ajax and such

Matt from Educause did a demo of his fancy tabs that use the javascript tools which he also hacked into a bit. I didn't copy the URL and can't find a link to it on his site. Maybe Matt will point us in the right direction.

Scalability and Performance

Some folks raised concerns about performance and scalability of Drupal. Generally, this hasn't been a problem in my experience, but my sites tend to be low traffic. There was very little that had been done to tweak Drupal's performance, so here is the list of stuff that I either do already (or plan to do) as need comes:

• There is Dries' comparison of various performance enhancements which comes to non-surprising conclusions: enable a PHP cache, use lighttpd, use Drupal's cache if possible
• There's the enterprise group and the performance and scalability forum where you can get lots of tips and brainstorm ideas
• The so called file based caching for HEAD (and 4.7 I believe) promises good improvements
• Ken Rickard offers skipping Drupal for 404 handling so the bootstrap doesn't get involved. I'm not convinced this is a great default option, but it's certainly a great idea depending on your precise situation and your implementation.
• The bad behavior module is likely to be useful if you have problems with spambots (which is apparently very common)
• The DB Maintenance module and the Optimize modules both do basically the same thing and were released within weeks - whoops! Anyway - better to have more modules than not enough and the idea is good: make sure that your database tables are defragmented (optimized)
• If installed and configured properly, robotstxt and gsitemape modules can help tell the robots to slow down on crawling your site
• And last but certainly not least, the trusty Drupal handbook page on performance tuning is of course very useful

Favorite Blogs

Moyra mentioned reading Nick Lewis and some other people like the stuff written by Lullabot and Zacker. I mostly just read the Drupal Planet which covers most everyone. Heck, they'll let practically anyone in there.

CCK and Views

We had some discussion on CCK and Views - people are pretty excited about these. One question that came up was "if you are comfortable with the php snippets and with writing sql/php to output the data, why bother with views. Well, for one thing that's a pretty small group that feels that way, but otherwise I'm not sure I've got a good response. The only thing I could think of is that Views offers some filtering that would be a bit of work to implement on your own and also that views should be more secure than the snippets (which are, um, occasionally unsafe but getting better).

OG

OG has always meant original gangster to me, but that's what I get for listening to too much Ice-T. Lots of people were interested in OG, how it works, what it does. In my mind, OG is like the next generation of forums. It allows public, private and mixed modes. It allows multiple content types to be included in a targetting system (e.g. books, forums, pages, stories, blogs, file attachments, images, events, urls, and anything you dream up with cck) which is much more rich than a simple "forum post" can hold - yet it is still an "audience targetted" means of delivery. And finally the concept of og2list makes it the ultimate yahoo groups killer. You run it on your own server where you control the data, layout, etc.

Theming

As I mentioned, lots of people were interested in theming. Interestingly, most folks who wanted themes feel into the typical pattern described in this post on urlgreyhot. We all want pretty, custom themes, but we don't want to pay for them :) To some extent some simple font/color changing system would work well towards a middle ground if such a thing were possible in the admin section.

On the subject of theming, one question was how to use a different header based upon the section of the site which is covered will in this drupal tip (and be sure to READ THE COMMENTS).

Awards and "how you found Drupal"

Finally, Moyra (a librarian) mentioned that she got interested in Drupal partially because the Ann Arbor Public Library was just "selected by the American Library Association as the best library website in the nation for libraries with budgets of $6,000,000.00+." Very exciting!

I'm sure I missed something. What else did folks remember being useful from the meeting?

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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO