Central Denver Drupal Meetup Recap, April 2013

At this month's Central Denver meetup, I didn't have an introductions question prepared as I normally do, so I just asked the first question I thought of: what's your favorite color? That turned out to be more interesting than I expected, a close race between green and blue, with blue narrowly squeaking out a victory at the last minute. This was the first month we did collaborative notes on Google Docs, an idea I stole from the South Denver meetup. Though we didn't have a lot of participation this time, I still like the idea of everyone being able to both contribute to notes and follow along in text to supplement the spoken presentation. It's very much in line with how we collaborate on everything else in the Drupal community. We had two presentations. The first, from Dave Bailey, was about Drupal project planning. He talked through his approach to making Drupal projects successful, and also things to avoid that tend to make projects unsuccessful. Everyone has a slightly different process, and it was really interesting to see both the overlap and the differences in someone else's process. Dave posted his slides online if you're interested and missed it. After that, we enjoyed a demo of drush from Ryan Kois. Drush is one of those tools that everyone recommends, but if you've never seen it in action it can be difficult to understand why it's so useful. Ryan went through the install process, helpfully (if unintentionally) demonstrating nearly everything that can possibly go wrong when installing drush. He then went through a list of handy tasks drush can help with, from the basics of cache clearing and enabling modules to more advanced features like using site aliases for database and file syncs. Ryan also mentioned a blog post where he went into more detail on site aliases. Between project planning and drush, we ended up with a well-rounded summary of what's involved in making a Drupal site, minus the actual site. After the drush demo, someone made the mistake of asking Ryan about his shell configurations, a topic he can easily talk about for several hours. Fortunately, he was able to limit his answer to several minutes, after which many of us headed down the road for a bit more socializing at Interstate Kitchen and Bar.