Posted by nategasser on December 13, 2007 at 12:30pm
Yes, the events should be combined, at least until they get too large
11% (1 vote)
Maybe combine some and keep some separate
56% (5 votes)
The Philly Drupal Group should be its own show with its own meetings
33% (3 votes)
Total votes: 9
Comments
Usability, CSS, Layouts, Interfaces...
Drupal isn't just about php, it covers an entire approach to dealing with a CMS. To focus on PHP would be to miss a lot of what Drupal has to offer. You also wouldn't want to limit a PHP discussion to only how Drupal uses it.
It's all about the audience...
It comes down to, are our members Drupal hackers looking to rewrite the Views module to be more efficient, or are they web generalists who use it as a tool to produce web sites? Those are two very different audiences. What a great topic for another poll...
It can be good at times, bad at others...
Given the reaction to Drupal from many PHP developers at the past meetups, both here and in other cities (i.e. "You're use Drupal??? I build my own CMS's) I'm thinking that it would be good to separate them, at least some times. I agree with Michael- Drupal's not just about PHP or programming in general sense- and conversations that focus strictly on the programming side miss the majority of what goes into developing a good Drupal site for a client & what makes the system so valuable and widely adopted. Good Drupal sites come from spending a large amount of time on strategic communications, design, creating an empowering workflow, and information architecture. These are the reasons (imo) why people choose Drupal: because it allows them to focus their dollars and attention on making the best site possible for their needs and environment rather than on reinventing the CMS wheel. I'd also love to see more meetups focused on helping out Drupal newbies and working together to hack modules/code that are problematic for the larger community (i.e. hackathons).
With that said, I personally love learning more about PHP and am constantly wrestling with how to read through code (espescially given the flexibility of PHP and the wide variety in the quality of the code), make patches/new features where and when I need them, make new modules to create new functions or change the behavior of others, theme modular behaviors, etc. etc. so I would love to see there remain some sort of connection. In a perfect world I'd love to learn more about PHP from a Drupal perspective (which is along the lines of Michael's calender perspective), since I tend to come at things from a problem solving perspective (i.e. how can I make the calender/views/any other module work for me), rather than from a more complex theoretical perspective (i.e. how can I build a new & better CMS... even though in reality I can't).
Which is just a long way of saying that I voted for the middle option.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
More Drupal group interest
It seemed the Drupal group has owed its survival by being adopted by Nate and the PHP meetup, but after last month's meeting it did look like the amount of Drupal interest has grown a lot. As far as meetings that are just social at the bar, I feel like the more the merrier and that we should stick together, but we could have more drupal-specific meetings that start out with laptops.
I was also wondering if we might be able to use Indy Hall again and have a group bug hunting / issue queue session. I think that a lot of people could contribute more to drupal with a little assistance getting started from the group.
-Jody
Zivtech | Illuminating Technology
Nate for President!
(fineprint:President of Lilliput,a fictional island nation somewhere in the Indian Ocean)
the energy and creativity(linking and including philly drupal with other groups & events: PANMA; PHP; Standards) has been awesome- and is much appreciated....i love learning what is out there and gauging where drupal falls in the whole scheme of things - a great thing about it as well- is there is usually always another drupal person to bounce things off of....
i too love the thought of what Jody/Alex/Mike said...and having a format that facilitates getting down to the knitty-gritty...as far as indy hall- i know they have basic memberships $25/mo that allows for conference room use and very occasional usage of the space----where ever this format ...i am sure it will eventually happen...i may actually join indy as i may be moving to that area...
i think using the groups here - in groups.drupal should be focused on more as well --may be we should also emphasize a tone that invites problems and questions- with the understanding they have been worked on to be resolved by searching for the answer on the web/drupal &or asked on drupal forums/issues----(this would default inherent validity to the question) - doing this would be that great goto place for more attention to something that you need brainstorming/help on...kinda like an intensified common purpose thing ...by the way anybody can help on this issue that I was having would be awesome http://drupal.org/node/200375 (shameless plug:)
jamie