Spokane Drupal Group March 16

There's a small chance that I will not be able to make it to this March meeting. And I will almost certainly not be able to make it to the April or May meeting.

However, we will still have these meetings -- Shawn and Jon have offered to host if I am not there, and in particular for March, Jon has confirmed he will be at the meeting on the 16th. So, please come!

What we talked about today:

• John gave us an update on his learning journey for Drupal 7 and/or 8.
  - Doesn't recommend the book "Beginning Drupal 8" by Todd Tomlinson
  - Thought "Using Drupal" (2nd edition) by Angela Byron and Addison Berry was pretty good, but to follow the examples, you had to download and use an old version of PHP (5.3), and old version of Drupal (7.x but old), which was problematic. But he did learn a lot!
  - The 3rd edition of "Using Drupal" isn't out yet, and now isn't expected until the end of 2017 (covers Drupal 8).
• Jennifer gave her usual plug for the User Guide:
  https://www.drupal.org/docs/user_guide/en/index.html
  Good for learning the basics of Drupal 8. Diane likes it too.
• Jon gave his usual plug for
  https://buildamodule.com/
  which you can subscribe to on a monthly basis. Has videos for learning Drupal.
• Other places to learn Drupal:
  - https://drupalize.me - which also has a subscription model and a course.
  - Lynda.com -- this is available for free with a Spokane County or Spokane City library card, and has a good series of videos
  - https://www.ostraining.com/ -- you can subscribe -- Drupal as well as other open-source content management systems
  - http://codekarate.com/ -- has videos covering one module each -- great for learning that one module that you need to learn -- free too!
  - YouTube -- search for particular topics of interest
• Versions of Drupal:
  - Dries recently wrote a post about Drupal 9 -- the plan is for it to be an easy upgrade from Drupal 8 -- http://buytaert.net/making-drupal-upgrades-easy-forever
  - Drupal 7 will be OK to use until Drupal 9 comes out (and no one really knows when that will be)
  - Drupal 8 still is missing some key contributed modules. Can be used now for simpler sites. May not be ready for more complicated sites.
  - There is also Backdrop -- https://backdropcms.org/ -- It's a "fork" of Drupal 7, which is being maintained, and new features added, and plans to maintain backwards compatibility. You should be able to convert an existing Drupal 7 site to Backdrop without a huge amount of problem.
  - Usage statistics for Drupal versions: https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal
• WordPress vs. Drupal:
  - Several of us in the group use WordPress for some things: simple sites, blogs, etc.
  - WordPress is great for setting up a site for a novice user (friends, relatives)
  - WordPress updates itself too, which is good for security fixes
  - But for higher-end or complicated sites, Drupal is the way to go
• Diane needs to connect a 3rd-party site (readsquared.com) that does reading programs and similar things to the Drupal site for the Community Library Network, so that the events on the Drupal site are also in the 3rd-party site.
  - Best workflow seems to be: Create events on the Drupal site, using a dedicated content type. Export data to an Excel spreadsheet. Import into ReadSquared.
  - Feeds module in Drupal - is for importing data into Drupal
  - Views can export data from Drupal. You need the Views Data Export add-on for Views: https://www.drupal.org/project/views_data_export
  - Making the view:
  -- Add a display of type "Data export"
  -- Change the format to XLS (click "CSV" under Format to change this from the default of CSV)
  -- Under Path settings, set up a URL for your data export. Maybe choose an obscure URL.
  -- Set up fields. The labels of the fields in Views become your column headings
  -- Set access permission so not everyone can see it
  -- Set number of items to display to All so you get all your data
  -- It is also possible to do a "batched" export, with a limited number of data records in each file (so the web site doesn't time out)
  -- Save the view. Click "View Data export" to see the result.
• http://www.mapsalive.com/ -- a site for building images with hover-over and click behavior. Works great. Can paste the resulting HTML code into a page or block on your site. Great for novice users. Or hire Diane to do it with CSS. :)