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Notes from June Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup

June 16th, 2012 Comments off

Yet again, this meetup group had more things shared than I would have seen coming. I continue to be very happy that we have this group in the area for sharing experiences, best practices, horror stories and whatnot. Modules and the like shared during introductions:

  • Jeff’s Handy Dandy Drupal Login Bookmarklet, bookmarklet to send you to a site’s login page and redirect back to the page you are currently on.
  • Feeds Tamper provides an architecture for Feeds to modify data before it gets saved.
  • Contextual layouts (different layouts/settings for various portions of a site) with the awesomesauce combination of Omega, Delta and Context.
  • Quick Tabs, allows you to create blocks of tabbed content.

After introductions Al got up and showed off what Quick Tabs can do. Through a good interface you can build a block that has tabs of content that can be nodes, views, other blocks or a couple other things. Pretty neat.

Sean then talked about his experience in porting two of his 6.x modules to 7.x. He had many things to share in this space, a few pieces of which included:

  • Modules should no longer explicitly install or uninstall its database schema in hook_install() or hook_uninstall()
  • SimpleTest is now builtin and should be used.
  • When using the Forms API, you needs to use #markup instead of #value for markup…for most cases.
  • Token has changed a lot and moved into core. He also needed Entity tokens to provide tokens for entity properties that have no tokens.

Sean had plenty more to share, but he managed to tag releases for two of his modules far quicker than anticipated. For anyone working of porting be sure to peruse Converting 6.x modules to 7.x documentation. I’m also curious how much luck porters (and devs in general) are having with the Coder module.

With the excitement of how much smoother his 7.x work went than originally planned Sean also talked briefly on transitioning a D6 site to D7. While he pretty much had to redo each view all of his data has migrated with very little pain…at least for the test site he has spent ~12 hours on. He expects to have his first site upgrade pushed out in two weeks.

Vonn followed up by showing how she is using Feeds Tamper to mangle data during imports on a new site of hers. I keep forgetting to keep Feeds in mind but now I will probably use it for future projects. A note was pointed out that when dealing with Feeds you need to make sure that content types you are importing into have “Create new revision” disabled otherwise you will have a revision each time your Feeds job runs.

One of the last things shared was the Poster extension for Firefox and Chrome. Thor uses this when interacting with web services and other web resources allowing him to make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type.

The next meetup will be Thursday, July 12th, shortly followed by a play day on Saturday, July 14th. July’s meetup might have a talk or we might switch to Show and Tell meetups on odd months…we’ll see.

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May Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup

May 16th, 2012 Comments off

May was another good month both in terms of information shared and turn out. We quickly got started with introductions and sharing of cool/new modules which included:

  • News that someone is looking to make Sean’s Meetup Events module and the Drupal Groups infrastructure work together
  • Maillog / Mail Developer provides an easy possibility to log all Mails for debugging purposes. It’s possible to prevent the mails to being sent, so there is no need for an extra mail server to test the mail functionality of other modules or the drupal core.
  • Module Instructions shows the content of README.txt and INSTALL.txt files for contrib modules, linked off the modules administration page.

Ben then proceded to introduce everyone to Drush, the command line tool that everyone should be using for Drupal work. He gave an overview presentation and followed up with a live interactive demonstration, stepping through key functions like module downloads and installation and using core commands like site-install.

There was significant agreement on having another Play Day soon, so Saturday June 9th will be the next one. Be sure to RSVP on the Meetup event, and perhaps share what you will be working on or hope to have a conversation about.

The next meetup will be a Show and Tell meeting held on Thursday June 14th, 6:00pm – 8:00pm. Check out the Meetup event page for more details.

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First Mid-Hudson Drupal Users meetup

May 8th, 2011 Comments off

We had our first meeting of the Mid-Hudson Drupal Users Group yesterday. With about 7 people for the first meetup, we had a good mix of people who have never used it and some who make Drupal sites for a living. I’m very happy we finally met and excited for future meetups.

We talked about quite a few things, mainly on what we should talk about in the future. Here is some brain dumping from the session.

  • We should meet monthly. Weekday evenings seem to work out best, especially with nice summer days coming up.
  • Something that worked well and we will continue for future meetings is going around the room so each person can share their favorite module. This month’s list included:
  • We should have a main topic of discussion for someone to present on. If we cannot get a projector from the library either Sean or Ben could probably wrangle up a projector for the night. Possible future topics include:
    • Payment Gateways
    • CiviCRM
    • Ubercart
    • Scaling and Caching
    • Mobile design
    • Organic Groups
    • Taxonomy
  • Possible things the group might do:
    • Mentoring
    • Peer Review (ex, “I need to display this data which includes x,y,z so I used modules k,q and d. What do you think?”)
    • Homework Assignments
  • Helpful blogs and video podcasts to pay attention to:

I think we’re off to a good start. We have some networking going and have already shared useful information. The next meetup will feature Vonn presenting on Taxonomy, which will most likely take place Wednesday, June 8th at 6:00pm. Vonn is lining up the Charwat Meeting Room at Adriance Memorial Library again. Pay attention to twitter feeds and the Hudson Valley, NY group at g.d.o to make sure you catch all the details.

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