We moved our third meeting to a restaurant, and had the largest group so far, sharing good food and a pitcher of Stella, and having a lively conversation about (what else?) Drupal. Attendees for this meeting were Jennifer Dixey, Warren Keuffel, Emilie Nouveau, Jakob Perry, John Sechrest, and David Sienko.
Jakob (japerry), the person who founded this group on drupal.org, talked about his previous work on Drupal Gardens and his current work for WorkHabit. He is hoping to expand WorkHabit's team in Bellingham down the road, so polish up those résumés and hit Jakob up for more details.
We briefly discussed our various efforts to play around with Drupal 7 on DrupalGardens, which turns out to be a bit more limiting than we had at first thought. Jakob kindly set up a VM for us to use as a Drupal 6/7 sandbox - multisite no less - for which I promptly snagged the domain name bhamdrupal.org. See his note below for more info on how to get access if you're a member of this group. This will really help us have more individual freedom to play around with Drupal 7 in a non-walled-garden environment.
In that light, Jakob mentioned buzzr, an effort similar to Gardens by the peripatetic Drupal-evangelists at Lullabot. Buzzr seems to be an intriguing alternative to Gardens, in that they offer "Partner" and "White Label" solutions that let development shops install additional modules, rather than being limited to their own curated set of features, and share revenues with Buzzr. From their website it appears they are working on the next evolution of the system.
Emilie (http://www.artsytype.com/) was a first-time attendee and talked about her work on theming, something she is clearly very good at, based on the LinuxFest website. (And by the way, go to LinuxFest! April is right around the corner ... start planning now!)
Speaking of LinuxFest, we discussed the possibility of bringing in a "big Drupal name" to give a talk at the Fest. Jakob will carry this idea forward, as he is active in planning LinuxFest and has many contacts in Drupal-land as well. If you have ideas for well-known Drupal people you'd like to see at LinuxFest, please send them to Jakob or to me.
David talked about his effort to get started on a Drupal-based version of the language-learning site he has developed for the Tulalip Lushootseed tribe. The challenges of trying to get Drupal launched in a Microsoft-centric environment were discussed as well, since that is a major hurdle for some of us. Jakob said Microsoft, to their credit, is putting a lot of effort into making it possible to run Drupal in an IIS/MS-SQL environment. That might make things easier for "Microsoft shops" to see their way clear to allowing something other than SharePoint as a content management system. In the meantime, having our own sandbox server for the group may help some of us get going with Drupal 7 sooner rather than later.
Hope to see more of you there for the next meeting! Lower Mainland folks, come on down! For information on our next meeting, please hop over and join the Meetup group. (But I'll make a g.d.o "event", too, I promise.) It looks like we will be sticking with 2nd Mondays at 6PM for the day/time, so our next meeting will be Monday, March 14th. Next location will be a quieter one, as some members had difficulty hearing and being heard in the noisy environment of New York Pizza. Stay tuned!