Tampa Bay Meetup!

Thanks for setting up an actual event for this. I'll be there and look forward to meeting others and talking about Drupal, and future meetings.

-Chris

i've been looking for a meeting place in the Tampa/St Pete area.i will drive over for the meet up. looking at the original thread there were quite a few people interested. maybe we should take a head count, especially if that Panera has no break out room.

Chris- where did you move from? how are you coping with this weather? i moved here from portland,or. and find it helps if you can leave a few months in the summer :-)

I'm from Seattle myself (my parents still live in Seward Park), though I lived in NYC for 5 years before moving down here to Miami less than 2 years ago. The humidity and lack of any mountains or rolling vistas is a challenge, but every place has its thing!

--D
(Drupal Miami)

For anyone attending the meetup in Tampa tonight - please make sure someone posts a wrapup on http://groups.drupal.org/florida after the meeting so other Tampa-area lurkers can see what they missed.

Something we've found to work great for getting new meetups rolling is to plan out the topics for the next 4-6 months during the first meetup. An easy way is to just go around the room and have people volunteer to present on something in the Drupal world that they're familiar with. The Gainesville group just did this on Monday night (http://groups.drupal.org/node/88409#comment-283704).

Also - you might want to pick a standard meetup day and time so we can post it at the top of http://groups.drupal.org/florida alongside the other regular meetups in Florida.

Again, sorry I can't make it!

-mike

Thanks to all who came out. For the first meeting I think it was a decent showing. We had Cindy, Pam, Joe, Mike, Adam, Shawn and myself.

We all eventually discovered each other at Panera and did a meet and greet for the first bit.

We discussed future meetings and here's the outcome of that discussion:

Recurring meeting:

• Date: 1st Thursday of every month
• Location: Panera in St. Pete (different from this meeting, they have an actual room for us to meet in)

Future meeting plans:

• October 7th - Mike - Will discuss a basic site setup and cron tasks (using Acquia and LAMP)
• November 4th - Joe - Will go over a nice list of "Starter Kit of Modules", or contrib modules that are often standard for website builds
• December 2nd - Adam - Will go over theming, the basics of setting up themes, good starter themes, etc.
• January 6th - Chris - Will show basics of CCK and Views, and how they can be used together

Additional topics of interest:

• Integrating Drupal/data into "the cloud" (ie. Amazon S3, etc.)
• Scalability (Adam mentioned he might be able to bring someone in, and Mike did as well)

Random notes I took:

• http://webenabled.net - instant development platform
• mediamover module - Adam used with Amazon S3 to host lots of images within Drupal for a client
• Genesis theme - a good starter theme
• CiviCRM - stand-alone from Drupal product, that integrates with Drupal (integration can maybe be hairy, but worth it once it's done)

Congrats on your first meetup!

I just updated the home page of http://groups.drupal.org/florida with your new monthly meetup date. Did you guys pick a time as well? Let me know and I'll post that as well.

You might want to think about posting the upcoming meeting schedule (and future meetup wrapups) as a new discussion instead of as a comment. The reason for this is that it will show up on the home page and have greater visibility as a new discussion than as a comment.

Since you guys have the next meetup planned, feel free to post it as a new "event" - this way it will show up in the event RSS feed for the Florida group.

-mike

Hi all,

I was glad to see a group start up in Tampa. I'm a drupal newbie; but, I've been in web development the last 10 years and database a few years before. I've moderate knowledge in php, asp (not needed anymore), css, html and mysql. I currently developed and support 2 websites (non-drupal). I'm using drupal now to contain programmer and support documentation and links. My plan is to eventually use it to monitor events, send alerts and investigate other remote monitoring capabilities.

I live in Brandon; but, I probably won't be able to attend the meetings live due to transportation. I'm on skype, so, maybe some day I can virtualize. I'm looking forward to evebtually meet/talk to each of you. Keep me on your mailing list>

Arnold