April 2017 Meetup Summary and Notes

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
tmanhollan's picture

Northeast Ohio Drupal User Group Meetup

April 19, 2017 - Cleveland State University

April's meetup offered a presentation and discussion of hosting considerations for Drupal sites. It provided an introduction to all components of the hosting stack and some suggestions of what to look for in a good hosting provider.

Meeting Details

Location: 11th Floor Conference Room, Rhodes Tower, Cleveland State University
Date and Time: April 19, 2017 7:00 p.m.
Topic: Drupal Hosting
Format: Presentation
Presenter: Tony Manhollan
Event Information: Meetup | GDO | Facebook

Attendance

Agenda

Opening Remarks

  • The meeting was opened with some items of general interest to our community, an opportunity to share job openings, news, and other items of common interest. We reviewed recent security releases.

Presentation, Q&A, Open Discussion

  • Summary: we discussed in some detail all of the components of the hosting stack. Some implementation details were offered, specifically main points where a default installation of these components would not be appropriate (e.g. memory allocation to MySQL, using apache's CGI interface for PHP with PHP-FPM, performance tuning, etc.) The goal was not to provide a how-to manual on hosting, but instead offer a solid understanding of the components as a basis for accurately mirroring your production environment in dev, avoiding and solving problems in your site's implementation that might not be obviously hosting-related, and making good and practical decisions in development and implementation.
  • An understanding of these complexities is also helpful in impressing the importance of solid, reliable hosting. We reviewed some hosting providers that we've collectively had good experience with, and some that did not quite meet our needs.
    • Pantheon was widely agreed upon as an excellent option
    • Acquia
    • Dreamhost
    • Platform.sh
    • Webfaction
    • This list and notes in the slides do not represent any official endorsement or disapproval by any of us individually or collectively. Our experiences were shared as a starting point for a thorough evaluation of all options.
  • Dev
    • Pantheon offers multiple free dev environments (pay when you go live)
    • Pantheon supports a number of options for local dev
    • Acquia provides Acquia dev desktop, which is useful even if not hosting with Acquia
  • Presentation slides with notes are attached to this post
  • Full presentation on Google

Future Meetups

  • JD suggested a topic of getting started in site building from a perspective of best practices, with a lead into later development. Often, users of Drupal start out by building a site entirely from core and contributed projects and then get into development to fill in some missing components. The idea here is to provide a good foundation to building that site by following best practices that will lead to good, productive development that also follows best practices.
  • Anthony suggested a topic and agreed to prepare a presentation for the next meetup on understanding roles and planning a workflow for roles throughout the life of a site. This is a topic that applies in general to all website production, but also translates to specific role-based permissions within Drupal and how different roles on a production team work together.
  • Thursday, May 18th was selected as the next meetup date and it will be at the same location at CSU; Anthony will reserve the room again. The event has been posted and more details will be added as the topic takes shape.
  • Other possible meeting locations for the future
    • JD suggested a meeting room that he has available in Ohio City
    • Anthony suggested a meeting room at the Shaker Heights library
    • John offered his library's meeting room at the Westlake Porter library
    • Again this month, attendees felt that CSU's campus offered a good central location. Some present used Uber to get to the location. No one had any issues with parking this month; street parking and garage parking were available.
AttachmentSize
Presentation with Notes1.14 MB