March 2008 Meeting: Making Diamond Sparkle - Forums & The Business Objects Community Site

Posted by dale42 on March 20, 2008 at 3:35pm

Start:

2008-03-27 18:30 Canada/Pacific

Event type:

User group meeting

Join us at 6:30pm on Thursday March 27, 2008 at Raincity Studios for the Vancouver League of Drupalers March meeting. This month's feature presentation: Making Diamond Sparkle - Forums & The Business Objects Community Site with Tony Chang from Business Objects and Angus Pratt from Pratt Web Services.

We'll also have a mini-case study on the SurDel Girls Soccer website by Andrew Tuline and, as always, general Q&A on any and all things Drupal.

Date: Thursday March 27th, 6:30pm
Location: Raincity Studios, 1 Alexander Street, Suite 400 in Gastown. [Map]
Cost: There is no charge and all are welcome

For those who don't need to leave right away there's typically a more social discussion at a local pub afterwards.

Agenda

Making Diamond Sparkle - Forums & The Business Objects Community Site
for Developers

Diamond is the Business Objects' community website for developers and it runs on Drupal. Supporting communities for .NET, Java, Web Services, Enterprise Information Management and Report Design, forums are a big piece of the community building. But implementing Drupal forums isn't always straight forward. From handling cross-browser theming to reformatting data display Tony Chang and Angus Pratt will talk about some of the challenges they faced in rebuilding the Business Objects forums on the Diamond Community Site.

Angus Pratt is a pixel mechanic and long time member of the Drupal community. Tony Chang is the lead developer for Drupal projects in Business Objects. Business Objects business intelligence software helps organizations gain better insight into their business, improving decision-making and enterprise performance. They were recently purchased by SAP and are best known for their Crystal Reports product.

Real World Mini-Case Study: SurDel Girls Soccer website

Andrew Tuline gives us the low down on how he put together SurDel Girls Soccer website, discussing the modules he used and his users' experience with the site.

Drupal Q&A

Bring your questions on anything related to Drupal from how to do something technical in PHP to what modules are needed to implement a feature you want.

Location Details

Raincity Studios

Raincity Studios are located at 1 Alexander Street, Suite 400 in Gastown. [Map]
There's a security intercom at the door, so you'll need to buzz to get in. Take the elevator to the top floor, then take the flight of stairs to the floor above that.

Wireless Access

There is a Free the Net wireless access point accessible from the Raincity offices.

Kid's Room

In recognition of people with families the Raincity conference room is available as a kids room. It is next to the presentation area and has glass walls so your kids will always be in sight. We can't provide child-minding or babysitting services - we just provide the room and leave it to you to entertain your kids. We suggest you bring appropriate toys/books/other entertainment.

Drupal Association

We encourage everyone receiving value from Drupal and the Vancouver League of Drupalers to join the Drupal Association: http://association.drupal.org/membership

Not only does this directly support Drupal, it supports the groups.drupal.org website where our group's web presence is based.

Comments

G'ah, that would be:

Posted by dale42 on March 20, 2008 at 4:01pm

G'ah, that would be: Vancouver League of Drupalers March meeting

Real World Mini-Case Study: SurDel Girls Soccer website

Posted by dale42 on March 22, 2008 at 12:11am

Horray!

Andrew Tuline has stepped forward and will do a mini-case study on how he put together the SurDel Girls Soccer website (http://www.surdelgirlssoccer.bc.ca/dru/), discussing the modules he used and his users' experience with the site.

Video Live Streamer Wanted

Posted by dale42 on March 27, 2008 at 12:24am

Roland won't be able to make tomorrow's meeting so we don't have anyone to live stream it.

Roland uses his Mac notebook and eyesight camera to live stream, that's all you need. If you'd like to volunteer, with what ever technology works best for you, please let us know.

Drag and Drop Image uploading

Posted by SteveK on March 28, 2008 at 7:22pm

Someone last night had a question about direct image uploading via flash or javascript. Here's a module that was committed today if you wanted to track it. There isn't a dev release yet, but you might want to check the cvs repo if you want to try it out.

http://drupal.org/project/Flex-Image

Production Designer & Developer
Raincity Studios

I work at The Jibe Multimedia, Inc.

Drag and Drop Image

Posted by rjdempsey on March 28, 2008 at 7:40pm

That was me. Thanks Steve!

www.rjdempsey.com

Slide Presentation

Posted by apratt on March 28, 2008 at 7:43pm

For those who asked for slides - They are online at:

http://www.slideshare.net/apratt/forum-presentation/

Thanks for the opportunity to make a contribution to the Drupal Community.

Angus Pratt
Poet, Consultant, Web Designer
Diamond Technical Community

Angus Pratt
Poet, Consultant, Web Designer
Check out my latest completed project - 64 Fun Solutions

I enjoyed presenting SurDel Girls Soccer

Posted by atuline on March 28, 2008 at 7:49pm

I enjoyed attending the Vancouver Drupal meeting and presenting the results of my volunteer efforts for the SurDel Girls Soccer Club at www.surdelgirlssoccer.bc.ca. There were several experienced members present and I hope to get more involved in the local Drupal community over time.

Andrew

Subversion and lack of knowledge thereof

Posted by baronmunchowsen on March 29, 2008 at 12:00am

Thanks for a great meeting last night. Thanks to the speakers also for taking the time to prepare their presentations. Many thanks for the beer also.

I asked a question about Subversion, and I have spent a little time today looking at it and I can tell I need to invest time and energies into learning this for sure.

For any other interested parties - the links that I was advised to look at were:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com ...a great big massive book about Subversion

http://www.unfuddle.com ...some sort of magic subversion website fandango (need to look into it more)

http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/community/subversion/svnx/features/ ...a GUI subversion tool

This is the boat I find myself in:

Friends ask me to tinker with their Drupal site (CSS, couple of modules to add etc.)
Website seems to have subversion installed (is this even the correct terminology?! And how do I know for sure?)
I know nothing about how to use subversion.
I don't want to cack up the site so I need to learn how to use subversion quick-smart.

If there are other people in the same boat as me, or a similar boat, or perhaps you're just interested in boating, I will be happy to post back to the Vancouver groups page with details of the experience of familiarizing myself with Subversion - let me know.

I'm interested in SVN as well

Posted by rjdempsey on March 29, 2008 at 12:43am

I'm in a similar boat. I volunteer as a web master for a motorsport club. One particular ex-web developer in the club (used to work for Blast Radius), was shocked by the fact I was not using SVN for the club website. I'm still not convinced we need it for our little site but I'm into learning all I can about it, especially since Boris emphatically proclaimed, "Every web developer NEEDS to learn Subversion!" I'm not in any position to argue with him, lol. I used a lot of CVS back in the day so I know what version control is all about, but that was a long time ago.

www.rjdempsey.com

Every developer who works in a team should learn SVN

Posted by awasson on March 29, 2008 at 1:05am

Versioning systems are great if you're working in a team but if you're one guy and you're not building modules, SVN might be a lot to take on at the moment. ...Unless Boris is willing to help out.

What versioning provides is a digital trail of all of the changes you make to your codebase. I haven't tried the subversion module for drupal but perhaps it takes snapshots of the database. It should be interesting anyway.

Andrew

Team vs. individual

Posted by boris mann on April 8, 2008 at 7:09pm

Yes, it is a must have for teams. For a single web developer....sure, potentially optional. Except, eventually, you'll be working with a team. And then you'll need to know SVN :P So learn it now, add it to the set of professional tools and processes you use (it's more of a process than a tool, really), and you're one step ahead.

Some things that SVN can do even for a single web developer:

have a base set of known module versions that you use for multiple sites
have a local working copy that you can keep in sync with the server version
let you recover from making some changes to a template or other file
make "hacks" to core or other modules that you can cleanly maintain as patches

And yes, I realize that some of these things might seem "advanced". And we haven't even touched on database management techniques yet...

Unfuddle gives you a free, single user SVN account (along with ticketing systems and some time tracking and stuff) that is an easy starting point to learn with. It also has paid accounts when you need to add people. An open source system you can install (beyond just an SVN server) is trac.

http://support.bryght.com has some command line options on how to check out and update from our public SVN repo.

Another SVN link

Posted by rjdempsey on April 8, 2008 at 2:58am

Here's one I found really helpful - A Visual Guide to Version Control -

http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-guide-to-version-control/

Great diagrams, better explanations than some of the others out there.