Drupal

Thanks to the organizing skills of Ariane on this coming Sunday December 14th the Vancouver League of Drupaliers, Vancouver's Drupal user group, is holding a code sprint for Fearless City. Fearless City is non-profit community arts project designed to give a voice to the disadvantages in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES).

If you'd like to help out we'd love to have you!

Check here for details: http://groups.drupal.org/node/17237

Also check out Dave's post, Fearlesss City and Vancouver Drupal Geeks Code Sprint for Festive Good!, and the Drupal Camp Vancouver post, Code Sprint Does Good!.

Simon Vreeswijk of North Studio presents Drupal SEO and Internet Marketing at Drupal Camp Victoria 2008. In this session Simon discusses optimizing and tailoring your Drupal site to rock the search engines, including things to avoid, things to do, and general SEO tips.

DCVic08: Drupal SEO

Nedjo Rogers presents Introduction to Module Development at Drupal Camp Victoria 2008. In this session Nedjo gives the basics of writing a module and some techniques to jump-start development.

DCVic08: Introduction to Module Development

The video can also be viewed directly: DCVic08 Introduction to Module Development at blip.tv

For a summary of Drupal Camp Victoria check out: Drupal Camp Victoria 2008.

Drupal Camp Victoria seems long past but it was only six week ago we descended on North Studio for some Drupal geekery and general fun. Ever the video nut, I caught a handful of sessions on camera. In this session, Indispensable Modules, Rene Hache of North Studio gives an excellent run down of the Drupal modules North Studio finds, well, indispensable. He also provided presentation notes: Modules We Can't Live Without.

DCVic08: Indispensable Modules

The video can also be viewed directly: DCVic08: Indispensable Modules at blip.tv

The October meeting of Vancouver Drupalers took a different direction this month, featuring a decidedly non-Drupal topic: Flex. Flex is a open-source tool set for creating Adobe Flash applications. Love it or hate it, there's no question Flash powers much of the web's rich media. And Drupal is no stranger to Flash applications with sites like The Zimmer Twins using it for creating an interesting and compelling user experience.

Presenting on PHP and Flex was Duane Nickull, Senior Technical Evangelist from Adobe. Duane is no stranger to the Drupal community. Some may remember his interview of Dries at Foo Camp, and Duane's former boss is Jeff Whatcott, now at Aquia. Duane's talk focuses mostly on Flex applications, with a bit of discussion around communicating with external applications.

Duane Nickull: PHP & Flex

Drupal Camp Victoria (#DCVic) at North Studio was a joy. A great part of this joy was the freedom from having nothing what-so-ever to do with its organization! But it was more than that.

Last Folks Standing at Drupal Camp Victoria 2008
Photo by nicky Tu

Local Drupalers Amir and Ryan Dempsey stepped up and organized our very own Vancouver Drupal-mobile rental van. Although the van was squishy the company was great. The trip from Vancouver to and from Victoria passed quickly. During our ferry ride over I teamed up with Dave O. from Raincity and videoed Dave doing what he does best.

Oliver (Olly) Walker shared four techniques he uses for making Drupal easier for his customers at the August 28th meeting of the Vancouver League of Drupalers. Olly, better known as baronmunchowsen on GDO, is a web developer who specializes in websites for small businesses. He's promised to post presentation slides and we were fortunate enough to catch him on tape. The video is available below or at blip.tv as Remembering the User - 4 Drupal Enhancements.

Update Sep 4/08: Slides are now available at Slideshare: Vancouver League of Drupallers - Remembering the User (August 2008)

In April 2008 the Vancouver League of Drupalers featured a presentation on email newsletters by Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing titled: Email Newsletters: WTF?, and an overview of the Simplenews module by yours truly.

The video of Monique's presentation turned out well and can be viewed with complete show notes at Email Newsletters: WTF? (6 Mistakes to Avoid), or by watching the embedded video below. It's filled with practical information and a must-see for anyone serious about using newsletters.

My presentation didn't video so well, so here's the recreated notes:

Overview

Simplenews is a module that adds newsletters to Drupal. It has the following major features:

Last night at the Surrey Drupal Users Group Rick Vugteveen from ImageX Media gave a great presentation on creating a blog site in Drupal 6 using CCK, Views and a number of support modules. He lugged his 20 odd inch monitor for the presentation and it worked rather well at the restaurant table. Not sure if he's going to post his slides. I haven't asked him yet, but hoping we can get a repeat performance for the Vancouver group.

In an interesting experiment the Surrey group has decided to go with a presence on Meetup: http://drupal.meetup.com/18/ in addition to hanging out with GDO Vancouver. I'm curious to see if and how this influences the community development.

Props to ImageX Media for their community support. They were one of our star sponsors for Drupal Camp Vancouver by being one of the first to sign up, first to get their cheque in, and additionally making office support staff available. If they keep this up they'll do for Drupal in Surrey what Bryght did for Drupal in Vancouver. It was, of course, fated that I misremembered and horribly mangled company president Glenn Hilton's name no less than three times before my miserable lump of a brain found a neuron cluster capable of simple long term retention. Sorry about that, Glenn!

And thanks to Katy at Seascape Web Design for taking on the group organization.

Drupal does not have user facing content management out of the box. Fortunately, a user facing content management page can be created in 5 minutes using Views. It's not a panacea, but can provide part of the solution.

I typically use this view in conjunction with a menu block. The menu block has visibility set by role and contains links useful to the user, such as a link to this view, the content creation URL (node/add/foo), and the user's profile.