Drupal Johannesburg July 2008 meetup summary

The third Drupal Johannesburg meetup took place on the 19 July 2008 at Obsidian Systems, and was well attended, by around 25 people (I didn't count, just guessing). While we are still feeling our way around the structure of these meetings, this month's meetup was a step in the right direction. Andre from Cerebra gave a workshop to demonstrate the power of Drupal's CCK module. During the workshop he created a site which allows users to post reviews of cell phones. Some of the modules he used were: contemplate for quick theming of content type data - we were warned not to leave the generated code in contemplate, but to then create a node template and paste the code there, as this is more maintainable because it's not stored in the database. He used the automatic node titles module (plus token) to create useful, and search engine friendly titles.

At the beginning of the meeting, a show of hands indicated that about 40% of the people there did not know CCK. A lot of the group were therefore fairly new to Drupal, and this is important for us to consider in future meetups. I guess the difficulty is really in making it interesting and useful to both the newbies and the more experienced Drupal developers. But, even as someone who has a lot of CCK experience, I was not bored, and discovered some things that I didn't know, thanks to Andre and input from the audience (thanks Diricia ;-)). Some of the things I learned: Admin role module Use the Admin Role module to "maintain an administrator role which has full permissions. By default, Drupal only has one super users, this changes that.". Normally, only the super user (first website user that was created) always has access to all modules/functionality on the site, even for newly added modules. So if you want to have more users who can do anything on the site, you have to create a role for them, say "administrator" and then manually grant thier permissions for whatever modules you have installed. This can get to be a pain every time you add a new module - you then have to go and grant more permissions. While I haven't tried it out yet, it seems as if this module will automatically grant permissions as soon as the new module is activated. Lorem ipsum snippet in textmate If you use textmate and want some filler text, just type "lorem" and hit tab. This will generate lorem ipsum filler text automatically. Other tips that stood out for me:

• Be careful of using CCK field permissions, as it can result on a heavy load on your drupal system, and can be quite fiddly.
• Check out light fantastic and the blueprint themes
• Charts module for good visual display of data: "Transform Data into Information. Charts is a very good way to highlight important information."

Carl also spoke briefly about a vision of future Drupal Johannesburg meetups conprising of a business section, skills development, and what's current in Drupal...This sounds good to me and Roger also agrees: "Carl's idea is a good one - to let this group be a practitioner group and we get to build stuff, learn from each other and acquire new skills. All in order to build towards a drupalcamp, I hope!". I'm really excited about the potential of this group, so let's all participate and contribute to make these meetups better - please subscribe to the Drupal South Africa group on groups.drupal.org and post your feedback, comments and suggestions there. For those that were at this meetup, please post your feedback on the groups site. It's up to all of us to make the group a success, so don't be shy to share your opinions and ideas. Big thanks to Andre for the time and effort he put into his presentation. Good job! Thanks also to Anton from Obsidian for letting us have a great venue to use.