Hi,
I am the founder of the Belgian Drupal User Group (http://drupal.be), we also have a lot of visitors from the Netherlands.
This weekend I organised two User Group related meetings at FOSDEM2008 (http://www.fosdem.org/2008/schedule/devroom/drupal).
Meeting: Dutch speaking Drupal User Groups
During the first meeting we made an sitestructure + actionplan (which will be published here when it is ready) to create a common installation. More details will follow but the general idea was
- a single installation for both drupal.be and drupal.nl
- a general entry page where users can choose to go either to the business site (www.drupal.be/nl) or the usergroup site (dev.drupal.be/nl)
- some content will be totally shared (forum, handbooks, translation server,...)
- other content can be localised (events, showcases, drupal service directory)
- when displaying views on that content it will use the URL to filter on country (nl or be)
- but still allow user to remove that filter
- a new theme will be developed (or re-used) - with a slight different subtheming for the different countries
- a service directory needs to be developed (or re-used)
- a show case section needs to be developed (or re-used)
Meeting: Collaboration between European User Groups
This second meeting was an adhoc meeting with people having some responsability in the Usergroups of
- Belgium
- The Netherlands
- Germany
- Scotland
- Finland
- Hungary (Gabor was not present at that meeting but we talked about this in the car)
Where we discussed how we are organising our Local User Groups.
The main conclusion was that there are basically two types of usergroups.
The smaller ones who could already are using their .groups.org to communicate and work together
The bigger ones who have enough resources to setup their own site apparantly have roughly the same needs and setup as drupal.be/nl.
So... let's join forces !!!
Instead of launching YetAnotherGroup on g.d.o, Gabor suggested that i should use this group (Drupal Event Organization) to collaborate.
In the coming days i will try to create a few polls to discover the needs of any Local Drupal User Group,
and use that information to either
- extend g.d.o functionality to be able to handle those needs
- provide input to Gerhard Killesreiter for his? Top Level Domain initiative..
- this would mean that he sets-up and maintains nl.drupal.org or fr.drupal or tld.drupal.org and allow those localised versions of drupal.org
- build our own drupal installation profile (Drupal User Groups installation profile) containing
- typical menustructuur + sitestructure to start from
- some custom modules for
- show cases
- drupal service directory
- event organisation
- translations..
- a drupal theme directed at UserGroups which could be localised using Color.module and/or Logo replacement
Current Status. (that I know of)
We (dutch speaking community) already have a good sitestructure but we hope to have a complete relaunch by the start of summer08
We will be developing a pleasing looking theme for the drupal4business-site
The Hungarian community (Gabor) already has a nice looking drupal showcases module
The Danish community (Morton) is finalising a Danish Theme + layout.
Questions
Anyone that knows of similar initiatives to build a DUG installation profile?
Anyone that knows of a module for creating a Drupal Service Directory (hosting, development, theming, ...)
Anyone that is interested in Helping?
Should we continue this discussion here, or move to a separate group?
Some links
- Belgium : http://drupal.be and http://groups.drupal.org/belgium
- Netherlands: http://groups.drupal.org/the-netherlands-nederland
- Danmark: http://drupaldanmark.dk/
- Hungary: http://drupal.hu/
- Finland: http://drupal.fi/
- UK: drupal.co.uk (has been hijacked by a small commercial drupal company)
- Rusland: http://drupal.ru/
- Romenia: http://drupal.ro/
- France: http://www.drupal.fr/ (not installed)-> who should we contact?
- Germany: http://www.drupal.de/
- Sweden: drupal.se (has been hijacked by some magazine)
- ...
- Others can be found on http://drupal.org/support
Greetings
Roel De Meester
Comments
What about....
Can we collaborate with this thread?
http://groups.drupal.org/node/8336
Are these different trains of thoughts or is there room for some collaboration here?
At first glance I think we have some great synergies between the two threads so lets see if we can work together.
Thanks for posting this. I'm loving the energy I feel from it.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Let's
Analyze the contents of the local sites listed above and distill the list of 'typical content & structure' for local sites. (I suspect it will not differ much from the list in Roel's post though). This should gives us a basic overview of the needed contenttypes and pagestructure.
The biggest feature that will often need actual new content to be created is Case Studies. There's a suggested template and good discussion about that here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/6418
I'll be helping with IA and theming for the be/nl redesign.
local subdomains
It would be great to talk to Gerhard and others in the webmaster/infrastructure team about local subdomains. I tried to propose this before and basically was told that it is not going to work because:
So all-in-all, the result was that we could either run a very simplistic multisite setup on drupal.org (which would not give you many options, and would totally not allow you to customize), or we run our own stuff on our own servers, under our own name.
IMHO this is all understandable as the drupal.org team has limited manpower, and their time is better spent on stuff already there, instead of managing dozens of local sites.
It's on the list
But more about language subcommunities rather than local user groups. Language communities make sense especially in a European context.
One site per group is overkill for other places. So, how/when do people graduate from groups.drupal.org to their own site?
hhmm
could you expand on what this would be "language subcommunity", its not clicking in my head at the moment
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Sorry
It's something I've been tossing around for a while. Language subcommunity is something like DrupalGermany -- yes, it's a country, but German is spoken outside of Germany, too, so it's a language subcommunity, rather than a country subcommunity. It's been discussed that we should generally support and perhaps end up hosting the country/language sites.
UK group URL
The original post has this:-
UK: drupal.co.uk (has been hijacked by a small commercial drupal company)
Too true. But http://drupal.org.uk exists and is run by some decent people afaik.
I'll be meeting with the Scottish UG in Edinburgh soon so hopefully will have more infomation on that.
Language subcommunity is indeed what we are aiming at.
Boris, Tnx for that definition and it's clarification.
In my opinion Dutch/german/french/italian/.... drupal community site differ from either drupal.org and groups.drupal.org/
in that..
Many of our visitors are no good in English so
1 we need a forum in our languages for technical questions.
2 we need a handbook in our language
3 we need a landingpage in our language to direct new-comers to a community/business site
4 we need userstories, casestudies, showcases, service directory in our language..
If groups.drupal.org/ or .drupal.org would be available as a installation profile containing those features that would help out a lot, but i agree with Gabor in that this would put an extra amount of workload onto the d.o infrastructure people.\
Also i have the impression that even if d.o would help in setting up e.g italian.drupal.org that this site would not have any success if no italian speaking people would be very actively involved in maintaining the site (and it's content). As a result they should also be able to maintain their own website (hence the installation profile we are aiming at).
We would use g.d.o/ or g.d.o/ mainly for (cross-)posting events so that people that never visit the local community site (but only g.d.o and d.o) would be informed about local events. (and/or job offers).
That is the direction we are planning to take in belgium/netherlands and other dutch speaking countries.
Being able to pull in a ical feed from drupal.be into g.d.o/belgium and g.d.o/netherlands would make this even more simple.
Belgian Drupal User Group lover - http://drupal.be
Belgian Drupal User Group lover - http://drupal.be
Multi-Language community ... for one country!
Hi all,
I am Belgian, I speak French and I really want to participate to the "Belgian Drupal community website". I have several french-speaking Belgian contacts that would be interested to join the adventure.
So my simple question is ... Roel,
Do you plan to open drupal.be to the french-speaking Belgians? :)
-Adrien