Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group

Emma Jane has been building Web pages since 1996. She built her first content management system a little more than a decade ago and has been using Drupal exclusively for three or four years. In the world of Web design everything seems to change overnight. It's hard to stay on top of the latest technology and have time to build Web sites for your clients. In this talk she will share with you the five key changes that have allowed her to create better Web sites, for happier clients, and at a greater profit.

Using webmaster-forums.net as a case study, we* will show how Drupal can be used as an effective forum platform and discuss:

• why we moved to Drupal forums from vBulletin;
• the modules we use and our configuration;
• opportunities for Drupal and the forum module;
• how Drupal can become a contender in the forum market, and;
• what we need to do to make that happen.

We'll be recording the session, so the highlights will be available online. If anyone has specific topics they'd like us to cover, please post them in the comments below.

* Liam McDermott (me) and Megan McDermott (drupalchick).

Last year, the University of Waterloo decided that Drupal will be its advocated content management system for web sites the university will be deploying going forward.

For our September session, members of the University of Waterloo CMS team will share information and knowledge about their enterprise-level Drupal implementation.

Information presented will include:

• Why Drupal was chosen as the web-content-management solution to implement for university-wide use;

In late February 2011, Drupal.org switched from using the CVS version control system to Git. The migration was more than just importing the old repository; Drupal.org is deeply integrated with our version control systems to power issue queues, notifications, and module releases. Come on out to this presentation to learn about:

Agile project management is a hot topic these days, particularly in software development.

This session will provide an overview of agile project management.

Our presenter is Eva Grabinski, who is a project manager in charge of the large Drupal implementation at the University of Waterloo.

Key concepts and terminology will be covered.

As well, the applicability of agile project management to web design and development projects will be addressed.

In particular, the application of agile project management for the implementation of Drupal will be discussed.

One again, we have Andre Molnar from Toronto as our guest speaker.

In this talk, he will cover the following:

• What is cache?
• Different types of cache (browser, proxy, opcode cache, persistent variable cache, static variable cache)
• I then focus on the parts inside Drupal.
• How to use a static variable cache.
• How to use Drupal's default persistent variable cache.
• How to create your own cache 'bin'.
• How to write your own caching module.

See you there.

For our March meeting, we will have a discussion about Drupalcon Chicago. Anyone who attended is welcome to come and share their experiences. Find out what's new in the world of Drupal, from design, to running your business, to proposals for Drupal 8!

Blaine Lang from Nextide will be delivering a presentation and demo of their workflow solution called maestro. Maestro is a workflow engine that allows you to create and automate a sequence of tasks representing any business process. If it can be flow-charted, then it can be automated. Blaine will be showing us the visual workflow editor to create and edit the workflows and using a couple workflows, show the user and admin features of maestro.