Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group

We did have a meeting scheduled for June 18, but that's the same day as our daughter's grade 8 graduation. So unless some of you want to meet without me, we will cancel that meetup for this month.

Would anyone want to get together for a social thing on another date? Please post here if you would come. Tuesdays are best for us (16th or 23rd) but the 24th/25th could work too.

Thursday, May 21, 7-9pm
University of Waterloo, E7 1331

To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Fran Wyllie, Dev Manager and Accessibility Specialist at Northern will be joining us to give a talk on Building a Sustainable Accessibility System.

Wednesday, April 15 - 7-9pm
University of Waterloo, E7 1331

This month, Eric Bremner and Shinong Mao from the University of Waterloo will show how they use Views Remote Data to connect to an external API to present important dates at the University of Waterloo. Two teams collaborated to present this content to students and staff with pages that get millions of hits during the year.

Note schedule change

Note that this meetup is on a Wednesday

Camp planning

Rescheduled
Thursday, March 5 - 7-9pm
University of Waterloo, E7 1331

Presenter: Megan McDermott, Woolwich Web Works

Offering dark mode on a website is becoming increasingly popular. It’s a good option for accessibility, and a lot of people just prefer to view web pages this way.

You might think this should be simple - just swap the text and background colours and you’re good to go, right? It turns out that there’s a bit more to it.

In this session we will look at:

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Thursday, January 22 - 7-9PM
University of Waterloo, E7 1131

Presenter: Derek Laventure, Consensus Enterprises

At Consensus, one significant challenge we noticed with the D8 config management system is the issue we call "config drift": if you make changes to a config YAML in your dev environment, what happens when you deploy that into a site with a different config? What if you only wanted to update one value in a config entity, but someone has changed a different value from the same config object in production?

November 20, 7-9pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 119

Looking forward to seeing you all at the SWO Drupal Camp next Friday, October 24 at the Kitchener Public LIbrary. We have a really strong line-up of talks scheduled so it should be a really good day. Don't forget to register!

Schedule
Register here

Registration for the first ever Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp is now open! Registration includes:

• An inspiring keynote
• A full day of informative sessions
• Lunch and coffee break
• Awesome networking opportunities

Thursday, September 18, 7:00 - 9:00pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 119

For this meetup we'll catch up on what everyone has been working on since we last got together. Everyone will have the chance to talk briefly about what they've been working on lately (Drupal-related or not). It's okay if you think what you've been doing sounds boring - maybe the rest of us will find it interesting! You can bring a laptop to demonstrate some things, but this is optional.

Some topics we'll be hearing about include:

• Making microsites with contained search

SouthWestern Ontario Drupal Camp is happening! Joing us on October 24, 2025 for a full day of informative talks, networking opportunities, and more!

Please share this with your colleagues - we would love to include anyone who works on websites including designers, content creators, marketers, and developers who don't normally work with Drupal (or haven't used it recently).

At our last meet up we plannned to have bi-weekly meetings to plan our fall Drupal Camp. These meetings will be on Wednesday evenings from 7-9pm Online only

Tentative agenda

1. Financing through new Drupal Canada organization
2. Finalize name - SWO Drupal Camp? Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp? Drupal Camp SWO? Some other variation?
3. Sponsorship levels & offerings
4. Marketing next steps - announcement, registering a domain, setting up a website, can we get a logo made??

Online meeting details

Wednesday, June 11
7-9pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall Rm HH 334

This month we'll hear from those who went to Drupal Camp Ottawa and start planning our own Camp in the Fall.

We are in the process of finalizing a date at the Kitchener Public Library in October or November. They have a theatre plus 4-5 other meeting rooms that would be a great fit for a small Camp. We'll take a look at the Event Planning guide and figure out how to get this done.

Hi all,

Just a heads up that we're going to change the meeting schedule for our May + June meetings. We are thinking about meeting on Wednesday June 4 or June 11. A few of us have some scheduling conflicts coming up.

Let us know if one of those dates suits you better!

Thursday, April 17
7-9pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 119

This month we'll be talking about situations where we've had to make a decision about whether to develop something in Drupal or to use a different solution. Liam and Megan from Woolwich Web Works will discuss three case studies:

• An interactive visual explorer for home owners
• A tool for creating customized print marketing materials
• A custom LMS for the restaurant industry

Thursday, March 20
7-9pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 259

Detailed directions to the room

Docker is familiar to most developers, and nearly all Drupal developers have used DDEV. They allow teams to work in similar environments, while eliminating global dependency issues. If there were stats for it, we'd find a dramatic reduction in 'Number of times a dev said "works on my machine" per year' since the introduction of Docker and development containers.

Thursday, February 20 - 7:00-9:00PM
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 259.

Detailed directions to the room

This month, Martin and Eric will demonstrate a website that loads critical CSS so that the first paint of the site happens very quickly and improves Google Lighthouse scores dramatically. They will show how tailwind and preprocessing is used to obtain this slick implementation and any questions will be answered.

Thursday, January 16, 7:00 - 9:00pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 259

Probable/possible topic:

For this month's meeting, Bryan Heisler will talk about using Drupal to organize his Warhammer miniature collection.

From Bryan:

User group meeting
Thursday, November 21, 7:00 - 9:00pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 259

For this month's meet up we'll be taking a look at some of the new initiatives in Drupal. We'll try out the new Drupal CMS and see where it's at, take a look at the new Experience Builder, and also check out some of the new AI tools.

Have you encountered any new modules that you're excited about? Come and share with the group!

Online Meeting Option

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84246166612?pwd=UkFju70UHIaXQ3qI3G3LanXgdVLF0E.1

Passcode 063469

Thursday, October 17, 7:00 - 9:00pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 259

This month we'll hear about a few different ways of viewing Single Directory Components (SDCs) including UI Patterns Component Library module, Storybook Module, and SDC Styleguide module.

Thursday, September 19, 7:00 - 9:00pm
University of Waterloo, Hagey Hall rm 119

For this meetup we'll catch up on what everyone has been working on since we last got together. Everyone will have the chance to talk briefly about what they've been working on lately (Drupal-related or not). It's okay if you think what you've been doing sounds boring - maybe the rest of us will find it interesting! You can bring a laptop to demonstrate some things, but this is optional.

Some topics we'll be hearing about include:

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