The April Drupal Nebraska meetup was held last Saturday. We opened with some Drupal news:
- DrupalCon San Francisco is over. Go watch the great sessions!
- Drupal is officially moving to Git. If anyone has any expertise with Git (or plans to learn it), we'd love to have a presentation on it!
- Drush released it's first stable 3.x release. There's a patch in the queues for integrating Demo module. Please test it and give your feedback.
We then discussed some group organization/infrastructure:
- I (Travis) was made co-organizer with Eric. Bring your complaints to the next meetup. ;)
- Zach was made director of marketing and promotion with responsibility for coordinating our efforts to get our name out in the community, to promote meetups and events, and to cooperate with other local groups and solicit involvement from local Drupalers and development shops.
- Patrick was proposed for secretary, but wasn't present to accept.
- We discussed a web site in the future...
- ...and a logo—a locally-branded Druplicon. We talked about a Nebraska corn hat or Huskers baseball cap and/or a piece of wheat in the mouth. Bring your ideas next time.
- We discussed ideas for encouraging mentorship in the group.
We discussed our favorite Drupal modules at length (and, I think, to great benefit). I shared my best Drupal 6.x modules shortlist. I mentioned the Belated PNG for IE6 PNG transparency. It implements Drew Miller's excellent DD_belatedPNG script, which in my opinion is the best solution available to the problem. (It doesn't break CSS sprites.) It doesn't have an official release yet; download it here, for the moment (and by all means encourage them to commit it). Here are a few other helpful resources on the subject of contributed modules:
- The module usage table lists all the contributed modules in order of popularity.
- Top 100 Useful Contributed Modules presentation by Deborah Fuzetto from DrupalCon San Francisco.
- 45 Modules in 45 Minutes: The Best Modules You're Not Using presentation by Mike Anello from DrupalCon Paris.
- Lullabot Podcast 80: Top 40 Drupal Modules Revisited.
- GotDrupal Video: Top Drupal Modules
Next meetup we will discuss how to find, evaluate, and select the best contributed module for your project. As that's a smaller topic, we anticipate more time for group sharing afterward. We didn't set a date. We'll advertise that detail as soon as we have it. That does it for this time! Thanks to everyone that came and shared. We hope to see you next time!
Comments
careful with "structure" and an external site?
Sounds like a great meetup. One thing I want to caution about is creating too much structure around the group. Having some roles so that you don't all feel overwhelmed in the process of running the group is great, but other groups have found in the past that creating official roles/titles creates a structure that stagnates the group more than it grows the group.
I'm also curious why you feel the need for an external site? Most folks (see discussions in Local User Group Organizers) have found that the best ways to promote their group are here on groups.drupal.org for those "in the community" and next on meetup.com to catch "web interested, but not a Drupal die-hard" and finally within local communities that are strong in your community (like if you have a really strong PHP group locally). But creating an external site for promoting your group is unlikely to succeed. If you "just want something fun to work on" then please help with groups.drupal.org itself! I've got tons of tasks I'd love to get help on :)
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
So Noted
Thank you, @greggles. We'll take your counsel under consideration. We plan to keep offices to a minimum, but we need a few people to be responsible for maintaining our various online accounts along with access credentials to them, our communication with local hosts and sponsors, etc. Our web site considerations are probably other than you're assuming. I'll abstain from going into them here for the moment. As to the tasks you'd love to get some help on, I welcome you to share some of them with us as community contribution and mentorship are two important goals for our local group. Thanks.
features are driven from users ;)
Regarding features on g.d.o, thoseare to be driven from user requests. My assumption is that you are building a site because g.d.o doesn't meet your needs. To the extent that is the case then the features I want to add are the features that are driving you away ;)
I tend to work on things that 1) lots of people are asking for and/or 2) that seem interesting to me.
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Actually...
Actually, the assumption that we're discussing a web site because g.d.o doesn't meet our needs isn't entirely correct. We're conscious of the pitfalls of duplication and the danger of dividing the community. We have in mind things that g.d.o isn't intended for, but we're not ready to discuss them in a public forum yet.
GotDrupal Video
GotDrupal has posted a video briefly introducing the 50 most-used Drupal modules: Top Drupal Modules.