Fourth Meeting Notes

The Bellingham Drupal Users Group met again on Monday, April 11th, at Bob's Burgers & Brew in Barkley Square. It was a lively conversation over good food: always a great starting point!

In attendance were Jakob Perry of WorkHabit, David Sienko of TulalipLushootseed.com, Warren Keuffel and his friend and interpreter (whose name I somehow failed to write down, but whose technologically-knowledgeable interpreting was greatly appreciated), plus new attendee Fred Williams, and Jennifer Dixey. Jakob brought his MiFi along, and David happened to have the right kind of micro-USB cable, so we even had wifi in the normally wifi-less confines of Bob's. Thanks, Jakob and David!

Jakob and Fred are part of the LinuxFest organizing team, and gave us a preview of Jakob's planned Drupal presentation, coming up on Sunday, May 1 (the second day of LinuxFest: April 30-May 1, at BTC, free admission). Jakob's is the only presentation on Drupal on the schedule, so it will have something for everyone, from CMS newbies with HTML and CSS under their belts, to experienced coders and Ruby/Django/framework-oriented people looking to find out just what it is about Drupal that makes it the go-to choice for web application development. Tentatively, the title may be "Drupal Unlimited". I hope at least some of us will be able to attend.

The bhamdrupal sandbox server is almost ready to go. The domain name has been reserved and should be linked to the sandbox server within the next week or so. We are still determining how to manage who will be allowed to use the server, but those details will be worked out and announced to the group soon.

Warren, David and Jennifer discussed their respective projects, and Jennifer brought up for an (informal) vote the idea of having a "topic of the month" for each meeting (which was Warren's suggestion, thanks Warren!) Everyone was pretty much in favor of doing that, so next month's topic will be announced in advance of the meeting so we can all come prepared to discuss it.

As a starter topic for this month, Warren asked about site management and how one might move development configurations and new modules over to a production server without disrupting the content that's already been posted to production. I'll write up a separate blog post with some links to information that Jakob provided to answer Warren's question. It's a deep topic, and well worth exploring in a separate discussion.

On a more formal level, the group discussed potentially becoming a non-profit 501c3 under the umbrella of either TAG or the Bellingham Linux Users Group. Being a non-profit would give us access to more possible spaces for meetings, and allying with either existing group would also expand our contacts in the community. Jennifer will look into both of these possibilities.

Vive la Drupal! See you in May!