VUG Media

I attended the first meeting of the Vancouver Drupal Users Group (VANDUG) tonight and let very excited about the project and community. I am lucky to live in Vancouver, which seems to be a Drupal magnet, with the OSCMS conference last month, and Bryght next door.

There was a free food, free wifi, free beer and the free exchange of ideas... and a ton of Macs. It doesn't get much better! Thanks to Boris for putting it and to Take 5 for staying open a bit late. Rather than write more about the meeting itself, I'll leave you with the Basecamp message I typed to my colleagues when I got home.

Thanks to sillygwailo for the photo.

Hey Guys,

I just wanted to let you know that I went to Vancouver’s first ever Drupal Users Group (VANDUG) tonight and learnt a ton of stuff that applies directly to the business. A few notes of interest:

Things seem to be really taking off on the project. Last year, there was the first ever conference on Drupal, which was attended by 30 people. This year, there was 300.

There are many user groups sprouting up around the country as I type this and many large companies are becoming interested. For instance, one of the members of the group is pitching a revamping the Georgia Strait site (shh...), which is quite a big job!

There are some good contacts to be made in the city. I would highly recommend a bit of networking with other companies, I know that a few were asking about Image X.

There was a lot of talk about improving documentation on the project, which is directly relevant to us creating training materials for our customers. There is a possibility that we could organize our own handbook making effort as a community effort and harness other people’s work as well. Same goes for the videos.

The rest of this is for Chris. Beware of nerdy excitement... [note: Chris is a fellow developer at Image X]

On the developers side, a lot of stuff is currently in beta that changes the ball game and allows for much better user interaction, work-flows and flexibility.

For example, I was shown a running version of the new Content Creation Kit (CCK), which is the new, improved Flexinode. What is happening is that every type of content is becoming completely flexible – everything in the system will actually be a flexible node that will plug into the data structure seamlessly.

Another thing that is going towards the core of the install is Views module, which allows you to completely customize how data is displayed and make it sortable. Here is the description from the site:

This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.

So in short, CCK = capture of data, Views = display of data. Perhaps with these new tools coming out, development and customization will be a lot easier (I know that Fightwriter would have been easier!).

Other cool stuff that was added was the option to put blocks anywhere in a theme, not just on the left or right. Auto-hinting on forums, improved search, easy image addition, live collapsing and expanding input forums, one click forum sorting… A ton of really helpful leading edge stuff! When 4.7 comes out in a month or so, things should get pretty interesting.

Tags: VANDUG