Notes from June meeting, planning for July

Thanks to everybody who came out & online last night! We had ten in person (three from Rochester, one from Syracuse!) and one online. The gotomeeting audio was AWESOME this time thanks to some extra hardware. And, of course, the video was great because Wally from HD Video Cafe hosted us in a screening room. Please chime in your thoughts on the location for future meetups - it's a hike for most but as John said, it's a LITTLE closer to Rochester than anything else we've found.

Speaking of which, we'll have a Rochester venue for the July meeting. That's another discussion thread to revalidate time of day and get feedback on locations. Anyway, I'm totally excited to make this a roadshow for everybody, and in particular to have even more outside-of-the-hosting-city remote attendees now that it's possible to hear and be heard online.

So, notes:

• Any takers on rerolling the patch for OG to make user merges work? It is sort of what's standing in the way of the Roch->WNY merge and I haven't had time for it yet. Smart module maintainers. :)
• I talked about Basic Drupal SEO. Steve Rosenthal had some really good points to add from his drupalcon training on the subject, too. A lot of you knew a ton more from having done most of what's in SEO Checklist -- I'll post the slides soon. The additional projects I mentioned for a step-beyond-SEO are Calais, Calais Marmoset, and RDF in general. This gets into content syndication land, more proactively driving users to your site via your content from places like More Like This widgets worldwide, not just search. I think it's relevant in a discussion about SEO because SEO is not the be-all-end-all measure it used to be. Now it's harder. With more other stuff to do. Thank goodness for SEO Checklist and the modules it recommends.
• Zack Glick presented on migrating Syracuse Central School District to Drupal. He has some really solid approaches to fostering user adoption among lay users. What a challenge! One notable thing from my perspective is that there's not a ton of custom development in the project to date -- this is a very good thing, IMO, as he's trying to pull off many more such migrations in the near future. Awesome. He's also pulling together a sort of mentorship program, recruiting students to be Drupalistas. This is also awesome.
• Then a few of us talked until they kicked us out, and hopefully everybody arrived home safely.

As always, fill in what I missed or underrepresented!

Any presenters for next time on topics as small as "how I themed this block" to "how I'm using an attached view" to "here's my process for starting a site"? We decidedly did NOT look at any code this time, so I'd really like for at least one of the July presos to have a code-forward approach -- theming-centric project (d6/d7), custom modules (from scratch or simple hook implementations), drush scripts, whatever. Just chime in here to step up in advance of the next meeting announcement!