This month's Central Denver meetup varied slightly from the normal format. The focus on the meetup was discussing our experiences and thoughts from Drupalcon Portland. As such, the main introduction question was, "Did you attend Drupalcon Portland?" It was nice to see that roughly seventy-five percent of audience had attended, as it left a lot to discuss. We once again provided collaborative notes for members to contribute to and we certainly had a lot more participation than last month. Thanks to whoever created the fun ASCII art at the bottom of the notes.
So here are some sessions that various members found most important and/or exciting to discuss.
John Fiala brought up a keynote for this year's Drupalcon, Thriving In A World Of Change: Future-Friendly Content With Drupal, wherein Karen McGrane addresses the very important distinction between storing data and presenting data, and demonstrates how WYSIWYG editing is a relic of the age of publishing; the antithesis of mentioned distinction.
Someone then mentioned Sam Richard and Mason Wendell's session titled Managing Responsive Web Design with Sass and Breakpoint. It's great to see SASS mature into a standard front-end tool, especially when RWD is only becoming more important with time.
Rick Manelius was excited to talk about the Drupal 8 configuration management initiative and all of the fun we'll soon be having with YAML. All of this was discussed at length during Greg Dunlap's session, Using The Drupal 8 Configuration System. This is a huge step in the right direction, and the pains that we've experienced using features and other tools that convert configuration into code will largely become a relic of the past. While this is great for the future, someone mentioned using a settings.local.php to alleviate some of this pain now.
Carl Wiedemann talked potential problems with Drupal 8's architecture, pointing to Mark Sonnabaum's core conversation titled We're Getting OOP Wrong and There's Still Time to Fix it.
And finally, Scott Reynen and I made mention of a couple sessions in that are listed in our Favorite Moments in Portland.
Whew, that was a lot to talk about. Fortunately we also had time to do something a little out of the ordinary. Normally we have a general question and answer portion of the meetup, but this time we asked if someone was willing to have the community help them work through the given problem in real time. We adopted this idea from the South Denver Drupal Meetup and it went surprisingly well. Maida Scott was able to resolve the problem of creating a subtheme out of the Marinelli base theme. It was great seeing the community's collective debuggin mind asking the question, "Why?" and identifying problems before making conclusions. Pro-tip: Drupal's theme and module registry gets confused if it encounters multiple .info files with the same name.
This was proceeded by many hurrahs; some were cheers over food and drink at Interstate Kitchen and Bar.