April 13th Albany Meetup wrap up and plans for the future

We had another amazing Drupal meetup this Friday with three 20 minute presentations, a lightning round, and lots of open discussion about Drupal, the group, and ideas for future meetups. If you're reading this, new or interested to Drupal, or looking for other Drupalers to get your drop on with, please join us at our next meeting!

Lightning round with MBouchard: Feeds module - How the feeds module can be used to map fields in data feeds to fields in entities for automated importing, how feeds can be scheduled with cron, and using the Feed API to create modules with custom importers.

Grid960, LESS, and Bootstrap with NJMahesh: This was a highly detailed presentation covering some of the latest tools being used in front end development, including explanations, code samples, and rendered samples of LESS and Bootstrap, discussion on how to incorporate these things into your drupal sites, as well as a whole slew of resources and weblinks. Viewing the slides is highly recommended. [slides to be posted]

Creating conference sites with the COD distribution with Topazzz: A well rounded introduction and tour of the COD distribution that covered many aspects of setting up and configuring a conference site. The slides cover some of the configuration areas that may not be straight forward in the documentation, afterwards we took a tour of the proprietary COD modules that come bundled with the distro as well as how to incorporate COD into an existing Drupal6 site. [slides to be posted]

Multisites in Drupal with patrickavella: A high level over view of multisite configurations, how to use them, and why you may want to use them. Glosses over topics including how to organize data as well as save space, how to control name resolution with sites.php, and some ideas how multisites can be used in conjunction with git and drush to save time and further organize data. Slides at: https://docs.google.com/presentation/pub?id=1LH0rdrn2d7OGJ_J9DiXIdzarqXJ...

Plans for the future:
The group, through discussion, agreed to continue holding future meetups at Union college, on the second Friday of each month at 6:30pm. We are in need of not just more attendees, but we need more people to participate with lightning rounds and presentations. We talked about putting more emphasis on lightning rounds in the future to try and improve group participation and to better vary our topics.

Some of the topics people in the group would be interested in hearing about:
Panels
CTools
Solr
Performance
Security
Views3 new features
Google Maps with Drupal

But many of us are interested in hearing almost any type of presentation. The Drupal platform is quite large and there is lots of ground that can be covered.

I made this post a wiki so that it can be updated with slides. Please feel free to add anything I may have missed, and we'll meet again soon!