We had a great meetup where most of the discussions were influenced/inspired by what many of us learned while at DrupalCon in San Francisco. We also heard about our website and our OSCon presence. Dan won the drawing for the free Open Source Bridge ticket. Looks like it should be a good conference and you have to love that it is all-volunteer run. On the flip side, unless I'm missing something, only a single Drupal session was selected. Sad though that may be, it's not a major issue, as it is a broader-themed con and there's plenty else of wider interest to most of us. Plus, many of the PHP talks will apply and and last year was a great con.
Anyway, back to the Meetup. Melissa talked about the test site for drupalpdx.org, the website to help organize the Portland Drupal User Group. Check it out, get yourself a sign-on and start submitting presentation ideas.
Grant talked about the emergence of the use of the Admin module (version 2.x, not 1.x) in combination with the Rubik theme, to make a super user-friendly back-end for users, along with a super nifty admin sidebar, or top/bottom bar. These have been developed by the team at Development Seed and it is an approach influenced by other projects, all part of the Drupal 7-inspired move towards a better UX. For a nice overview, the module maintainer for the Admin module, yhahn wrote a blog entry about this combination: Admin 2 + Rubik: Improved UI for Drupal Admins. They also have a screencast, which additionally covers some incredible work being done with Context 3, which looks fantastic. Well worth watching to get a sense of what I showed, with the added bonus of the Context stuff, which will knock your socks off. Back to Admin 2, the only thing I was doing additionally was to add my own context-sensitive blocks to the admin bar, which showed the user help pertinent to the page they were on, including help images using simple Lightbox2 magic. The help blocks themselves were built using CCK and Views, along with an argument with some custom code. The help text was then held in a book, along with other help text, using the core book module.
Remember that this approach is still cutting edge, so you might have to deal with some small issues. Many fixes can be found at the issue queues at both the module and the theme. So far, most of my own small fixes were needed from the theme, and I found several answers in the queues. Either way, I'd strongly advise you to test this on a test site before trying this on a live site. Also, Rubik does not play nicely with some other admin modules, for example, Filter Permissions, so if you have an issue, try disabling any JS-based admin modules on the pages where you're having trouble.
I should also add that if you swap from Admin 1 to Admin 2, you may lose and/or gain some functionality, as I did, most notably in the hover-over configure/edit links and the like, again highlighting the need to test. Admin 2 follows a more subtle UX philosophy (see the Development Seed blog post for more info), so it uses a more subtle icon set and you may prefer Admin 1's icons. There are also other reasons to stay with Admin 1, particularly if it negatively impacts your users, or if you had already customized Admin 1, though on balance I'd say Admin 2 was a huge step up and features an approach superior to anything else I've tried... and my user totally loves it.
Chris Strahl talked about the Drupal Redesign, Drupal project management and agile development. A future presentation may come out of this discussion.
Mikey talked about a host of new features in Drupal 7, which is going to shake up the Drupal world, and the broader CMS world as well.
Sarah talked about our OSCon table: volunteers needed!