Drupal February Drop-In Recap

The Microsoft offices were once again heaving last night in anticipation for Feb’s Drupal drop-in event. The theme this time? Killer modules. And nowhere a cupcake in sight.

WebMatrix

I (Andy Robb) kicked off with an overview of WebMatrix and how easy it is to run Acquia Drupal 6  or Drupal 7 on Windows. If you use a Windows environment, it’ll help you churn out sites and apps really quickly. If you don’t use Windows it’s a great way of getting familiar, testing and prototyping. Michael Sullivan from Microsoft spoke briefly about our desire to provide more compelling hosting offers – offering a free 6 month deal to folks who would be willing to provide input and insight – if you’re interested in free stuff feel free to mail me (andyrobbwork@hotmail.com) or Tweet (@androidrobb)

Check here for more info on how to get Drupal up & running on WebMatrix or here for the presentation.

Flags and Draggable Views

Nicholas Thompson then stepped up to cover Flags and Draggable Views, covering how to ‘mark’ nodes or listed users, Weights that extend Flags to order marked items, and extensions to Views for administering ordered lists. Flags are effectively a system for highlighting nodes, and is great for bookmarking, marking items as ‘important’, friends, or even offensive content – and can be per-user (each member can mark one individually) or global (like an on/off switch whether it’s all or nothing for everyone). Click here to learn more or here for the presentation.

Panels

Next up: Panels by Marcus Deglos. Kicking off with a couple of great entry slides (including a Marmite jar – there’s mixed opinion) we ran through the Layout framework, Support for multiple layouts, and Drag n’ drop positioning of content; in addition to the pain points of Bugs, Documentation and the Learning Curve required. Basically panels lets you manage complex layouts by positioning a single block in different regions for different pages. Through a combination of API hooks, Plugins and Exports developers can get a better UI, further extensibility and it integrates with Features. Hold your breath to see if it rears its head in Drupal 8. Here for more or here for the presentation.

Favourite Modules

A quick stop by Favourite Modules: Masquerade, Nodewords, CMF and Backup Migrate by Neil Cameron followed:

• Masquerade – Switching between users with one click.
• Nodewords – Auto/manual control meta tags; Description, canonical URL, SEO and keywords.
• CMF (Content Management Filter) – Search title/body, created dates, auto complete author.
• Backup Migrate – does what it says on the tin

Interested? Or here for the presentation.

Apache Solr

We then moved on to Search where Jakub Suchy from Acquia ran us through the current limitations of search (ie no sorting by relevance, no filtering the results sets, no recommended content) and how Apache Solr, an open source search server written in Java, helps with faceted navigation, content recommendations and across open office files, rich text and loads more. The presentation also had the best part of the night – when Jakub mentioned Google the building alarm briefly went off. I don’t think this was intentional, but you never know… More info here or here for the presentation.

Module Tour

A short and sweet presentation but great live demos up next with Richard Jones from i-KOS talking about some killer modules: the Amazon API (integrate with the Amazon API in order to pull product data from the Amazon site into node content on your own site), Gridder (theming with grids) and the Module Filter (quickly narrow down the list of modules on a site for quick and easy administration). Great way of bringing some awesome modules to life. i-KOS information this way, presentation here.

Display Suite

Display Suite was presented by Vamory Traore: How to keep both themers and developers happy? The premise here is around overcoming the complexities of all the Drupal theming such as file duplication or trying to centralise the process – enter Display Suite. By extending the build modes in the UI it lets themers change the modes easily from a central location – connecting with Drupal Objects, Views, Panels and Contexts.

Check it out here or the presentation here.

Context

Speaking of Contexts, Bill Kay talked through the five W’s and a How of the Context module for grouping and organising content. Rather than simply extending blocks you use the Chaos tool suite – name it, set conditions, then set your reactions. Easy.

More info from Bill here or the presentation here.

Features

We finished up with an overview of Features by John Griffin: Configuration being stored in the database makes merging, staging and reverting difficult so why not export the config into code, that can be version controlled and diffed? You can then deploy code using version control, revert where required and rest assured that the config lives in code with content in the database. Lovely. Presentation can be over here.

Thanks to…

Beer and pizza was a must so thanks to CodePositive for sponsoring! It was great chatting with folks about modules and envisioning what future modules could be created. As always – many thanks to Mark Baker and Robert Castelo for organizing! Big thanks also to Karen Leech for the pics! Until next time Drupal folk…

The crowd