Spokane Day-time Learn/Co-Work Group May 19

jhodgdon's picture

Posted by jhodgdon on April 15, 2016 at 10:36pm

Start:

2016年05月19日 10:00 - 12:00 America/Los_Angeles

Organizers:

jhodgdon

Event type:

User group meeting

We hope you can join us for the next meeting of the Spokane Day-Time Drupal Learning and Co-Working Group!

When: Thursday, May 19, 2016, 10 AM to noon
Note: We're meeting on the 3rd Thursday this month, because organizer Jennifer is not available the 2nd Thursday. Hope that is OK.
Where: Spokane County Library - Argonne branch, 4322 N. Argonne Road, Millwood. We are currently meeting in the small conference room at the library. From the hallway, go into the library proper, past the checkout/information desk, take a right and you'll see the room on the right.
To be reminded, sign up!: To receive an email reminder closer to the date of the meeting, log in and click the "Sign up" button; log in and click "Cancel signup" at a later time if your schedule changes and you can no longer come. There's no obligation to come if you sign up (but we hope you will!). There's also no obligation to sign up in order to come (it's up to you if you want a reminder or not).

What: Learning and "co-working" time - bring your laptop, or just watch on the projector screen. Come with a project you're working on, a desire to improve Drupal in some way (documentation, programming, design, marketing etc.), a question about Drupal you would like to get an answer to, or a desire to help others with their projects and questions. Or just come and listen and observe.
Who: Everyone is welcome -- the only prerequisite is having some interest in Drupal. This group is usually 5-10 friendly people, with experience levels ranging from novice to expert, so you'll fit right in. Because of the size of the group, you will have time to share something you've learned, or get your questions answered, or both!

Note: If you'd like to have a meeting at another time that is more convenient for you, please feel free to organize it! See http://groups.drupal.org/node/161584 for a Wiki where people have listed when would be convenient for them to have meetings.

Comments

Meeting notes

Posted by jhodgdon on May 19, 2016 at 9:31pm

jhodgdon's picture

What we discussed at the meeting today:

Training last month -- went OK. Next time we should:
- Get more bandwidth
- Do it interactive the whole time instead of work-on-your-own
- Still need people there to help people with trouble
- Do it about once a year
Updating Drupal 8 Core - how to, if Drush isn't working?
- Check the User Guide, which has a topic on updating Core:
https://userguide_new-drupal.dev.devdrupal.org/d8guide/en/security-updat...
(log in with drupal/drupal to see this page)
- There is an error there currently (user guide is in progress of editing!) -- you need to remove both the core and vendor directories.
Drupal hosting suggestions (with virtual servers):
- Blackmesh
- Aquia (expensive for live environment, root access is not easy)
- Pantheon (has good capability for development/live sites)
- Platform.sh
- Cloud ways
Where to get Drupal help:
- This meeting
- IRC -- see https://www.drupal.org/irc
- Buildamodule.com (videos)
- Lynda.com (videos: if you have a Spokane County Library card, you can use it for free -- click on Digital Library)
- http://drupal.stackexchange.com/
- Go to an event, such as DrupalCon -- see https://assoc.drupal.org/drupalcon to find the next one -- you can also watch the videos from past events -- see https://assoc.drupal.org/drupalcon/drupalcon-locations for a list. There are also regional events -- see https://groups.drupal.org/events
- Two events to think about (three actually):
-- https://2016.drupalcampcolorado.org/ (Denver -- August)
-- http://2016.badcamp.net/ (Oakland -- October)
-- http://2016.tcdrupal.org/ (Minneapolis -- June)
- And there will be a Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Vancouver in 2017
Apparently, we need a logo and a sticker. Jose?
Why do people choose Drupal? Because we've tried other things, and Drupal is better in these areas:
-- User interface (better than some CMS at least)
-- Cost - in other systems, all the add-on modules are free
-- Customization capabilities (as compared to WordPress -- easier to add custom functionality)
-- Reliability / uptime
-- Maintainability - updates, notifications when they are needed, etc.
-- Security - there is a dedicated security team in the Drupal project
-- Community - mature, with 100,000 contributors giving freely of their time and expertise
-- Code quality, modern coding standards, mature code
-- Better for enterprise-level sites (complicated functionality)
-- Robust and complex roles and permissions system
-- The Views module, which allows you to display bits and pieces of content in different ways (write once, display multiple places)
Join the group at https://groups.drupal.org/spokane-wa to get notified of new comments and posts in the group (including meeting announcements).
Complex layouts - Panels module https://groups.drupal.org/project/panels -- not ready for Drupal 8 yet
Or you could just use the core Block Layout functionality. Your theme will need to have regions to put blocks in.

Other useful modules:
- Paragraphs
- Display Suite
- Panels Bootstrap Layout Builder (D7 but working on 8)
Responsive design (mobile ready):
- Be sure to use a theme that is responsive
- Images can be an issue, but can use CSS to fix them up
- Go to https://www.drupal.org/documentation and click on the Theming Guide
Notifications - Rules module is useful
Friday night - http://hackspokane.com -- "Code in the Dark" event (front-end developer contest) [Note: .com , not .org -- just edited this after the original post]
On Facebook: Inland Northwest Technologists -- formally "Build Guild" -- has meetups for various types of technology
Jon explained about using the Domains module to host multiple sites with different domain names, with some shared content and some things different, on the same Drupal installation
Email -- probably want ActOn, MailChimp, Constant Contact, or some other third-party service, not just Drupal, for email marketing. Drupal has the SimpleNews module, for simple cases.
Customer Relationship Management -- probably will need SalesForce or CiviCRM. There are integration modules for Drupal.
Social networking in Drupal:
- Organic Groups module - what groups.drupal.org uses
- Can easily build forums as well - core Forum module
- Notifications module will notify people of new content in areas of interest
- Can have ways for members to contact each other
Login - you can use 3rd-party services to authenticate to a Drupal site, as an alternative to typing in your Drupal user name and password (this is known as SSO - single-sign on):
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Google
- LinkedIn
- OpenID
- OAuth
- etc.
Logging in is a barrier... Can have people do things without logging in (with moderation) in Drupal