Address and directions here...

http://www.drupaljedi.com/event/2008/07/august-jedi-council

I've never been to a "Barcamp" (yet), but I think I get the concept. Barcamps are an "un-conference" where people post topics at the conf on a board for discussion, or prior to the conference in a wiki. So in the spirit of a Barcamp, in next couple of days if everyone could edit the wiki here...

http://groups.drupal.org/node/13680

Location(s)

Last month's meeting was awesome, and Tom McCracken at McLevel 10 Design has offered to host this month again at Level 10 Design in Dallas.

What are the topics? You decide! Edit the wiki here:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/13680

See you there!

See you all there at 7:30!

Please call my cell if you have any trouble finding it...if you don't know my cell # then please email me beforehand at dlraney{at}gmail.com and I'll email it to you.

Lee

Location(s)

We are excited to have our first ever meeting hosted at a company location! Tom McCracken at McLevel 10 Design has offered to host the July meeting at Level 10 Design in Dallas. Level 10 is a web design and development company with a growing use of drupal for client projects. Tom and Josh McCormack (Interactive QA) will be presenting some of their recent work using drupal for ecommerce and social networking sites.

This should be a VERY GOOD meeting so if you haven't been in awhile, or have never been but thinking of coming to a meeting, please join us!

Tuesday, July 1st, 7:30 p.m.

Last meeting Chris showed us how he's displaying Tweets (Twitter posts) on his site. Good to know how to do this, with nothing better than the 4 only MyBlogLog module to offer a packaged solution.

I'm working on a new theme for this site to match the logo I already started. I'm thinking of using a color palette that includes black, brown, fuchsia, and white? I'll probably start with an existing contrib theme as the base. Suggestions/commentary welcome.

Does anyone know how to allow users to post pictures with their comments?

Location(s)

Topic for this week- the "Must Have" list of modules for a drupal site. Lee has been working on a "Module Matrix", and Josh has several modules to discuss. Come with your list and we'll discuss! Should be a great meeting this week.

Found a better location in Frisco than the old place we used to meet...It's a Grind is right off the Tollway so more convenient. Hope to see many of you there!

Lee and Josh

I think the next meeting would be June 3rd. How about meeting in Addison at Dunn Bros?

Location(s)

Looking for Volunteers for Presentations!

Got a great drupal site to show off, or a cool module you want to show us? For the May meeting, we would like to find 1 or 2 volunteers willing to present (20 mins or so). Please contact me (Lee Raney) or reply to this post if you would be willing to present.

2 Presentations so far...

"Finding the right Domain Name for your Site"- Lee Raney

When
Tuesday, February 26, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Where
Mug and Mouse
5995 Preston Road Suite 105
Frisco , TX 75034
469-362-8590

Josh McCormack is going to demonstrate the SEO Checklist module - very cool!

See you there!

I have successfully gotten Drupal up an running on HostGator.com. I was very skeptical going into this but it is looking good so far. I have been most pleased with the response from tech support. Here are some of the issues I encountered:

* smtp not working - update DNS MX settings to route to my MX host. HostGator expects that you are using them for email.

* clean urls not working - I added an .htaccess file and it fixed the problem

Interesting stuff we could perhaps discuss sometime....

Drupal focuses on content, not on users. So a social networking site where people are the center, rather than an interest, require some adjustment to Drupal if it's to be used to run it.

The adjustment really boils down to profiles. Dries has made it clear that users should not be nodes, but there is a group interested in making profiles nodes (a slight difference from users). Also, some interesting things have been done to extend Drupals profiles in interesting ways. Here are some fun links to check out:

I have a site that gets a moderate amount of traffic. I may get 500 visitors per day. I turned on Forums and the performance of Apache/MySQL has gone straight into the toilet. I'm seeking advice/help with tuning for Drupal.

Hi,
I posted this on the drupal.org site but would really love it if someone local could respond.

I have a community site that will do upload of videos and have biographies. The Book project may be a good fit for the biographies because multiple people will contribute. Theme will probably need to be customized. This site could get very large so need someone familiar with optimization and performance best practices.

The other part is standard stuff: blogs, forums, etc. Need that stuff asap.

Two Drupal updates in as many days. I have not updated just yet. It takes me a few hours to do an upgrade as I need to do a full backup and then run through a test plan.

transcending CSS by Andy Clarke

This book's purpose is NOT to teach you CSS. It has great CSS examples but it
assumes you know CSS.

What this book does teach you is how to design with CSS. It starts the process
with the concept of designing "content out". If you are a programmer who simply
replaced table elements with div elements and thought you were using CSS, think again.
A real CSS designer will look at the content first, then choose, in a logical fashion, the

Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate

This book is a good start. It is ideal for someone who wants to quickly learn Drupal Development without spending a lot of time reading a book.

Pro: It has short chapters so you can quickly read through the book. I read every chapter.
Con: It has short chapters so it doesn't go into nearly enough detail.

I'd like a follow up book that was twice as long and went into more thorough examples.

If you want complete control over RSS feeds, I have used MagPieRSS to fetch RSS feeds and store them in my local database. It has a notion of stale content to optimize your page presentation. I am no longer using it in favor of the Drupal Aggregator but I wanted to pass on the link since I mentioned it at the November Jedi Council meeting.

I posted my notes from our 11/27 meeting on our group page at Drupal.
But I wanted to provide more links to resources that were not strictly Drupal related.

Web Developer extension for Mozilla browser that has a TON of useful tools in its toolbar:
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper

Firebug:
http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/

View Source Chart -- a much better view source for Mozilla:
http://jennifermadden.com/scripts/ViewRenderedSource.html

The jquery accordion used by Dustin:
http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/