Notes from August meeting, planning for September

This was our lowest-attendance meeting yet, probably for two reasons: 1. somewhat-later-than-usual notice on location and 2. location (Niagara Falls). That doesn't explain low online attendance, though, so if you all have constructive crit or suggestions, I'm all ears. I'm also open to co-group-admins who've been with the group for a few months and showing up to meetings / otherwise very involved already. Approach me!

Notes:

We had this enthusiastic Buffalonian come out (Dan M / @magnachef) who's mostly a Perl programmer, but who's versed in API architecture and PHP for his work at a little startup out here. He had some "Why should I care about Drupal?"-type questions, and we walked through the layers, how Drupal is MVC-like but not strictly MVC, the hook implementations in core + contrib are amazing assets that speed custom development, and we're more attractive than Symfony developers. It's always fun to Sell Drupal.

Other topics (many thanks to John W who took notes -- the theme of this meeting was Attention Deficit):

• Devel module and Devel Themer are very useful for hunting down variables and theme files
• If you're looking to contrib anything or otherwise share (github, whatever), run it through coder.module for syntax and best practices.
• functional tests (not unit tests) are being built into D7 by way of SimpleTest. I'm pretty sure you need to have a .test file with your tests in it to have a module or patch approved / RTBC'd. (That's kind of a giant leap forward.)
• D7's multisite capabilities are growing -- google up "drupal multi-site directory aliasing" for details. We walked through the multisite process for D6 by way of a couple of examples
• Andrew reported on some of his work with WXXI; very cool stuff happening there. He's a superman.
• Brian uses Beanstalk for Subversion/SVN hosting, so we talked about that for a while.
• Anthony had some Qs on node rendering and getting rid of variables from display
  -- Brian: I really like to use preprocessors, but you can use a node-contenttype.tpl.php too
  -- Don't forget you can use the Display tab in CCK for your content type to exclude fields from Full Nodes and Teasers
• Talked briefly about subtheming w 960.gs.

In all, we didn't get into huge topics.

Planning:

If you're interested in presenting at the September meeting, that should be on Tuesday, 21 September 2010 @ 7pm. Location is TBD, but Coworking Rochester has invited us back and the owner of Cole's in Buffalo (near Buff State) has provided me some contacts to call about getting a room there.

Discuss!