Albany Drupal Meetup Notes

The first quarterly (hopefully ) Drupal meetup for the Albany, NY group took place last Saturday. Seven people from the upstate New York area attended and there was a lot of really good discussion about Drupal. Here's a summary of some of the things that we discussed.

Drupal for Educators

One member of the group was interested in using Drupal in an education setting. There was a discussion of whether or not Joomla or Drupal would best meet this person's needs. It's not surprising that we all felt Drupal was a great choice. That said I think it's important to be able to clearly and concisely make the value proposition for Drupal vs. other platforms such as Joomla and WordPress. Like anything else if we want Drupal to grow in a competitive environment then we need to know how to sell Drupal.

I recommended joining the Drupal in Education group for active discussion with people who are using Drupal for education on a daily basis. I also recommended checking out Moodle Integration which can add learning management features to a Drupal site. After the meeting I also discovered another Drupal 4 Educators site. There are also plenty of sites to be found via a Google search on "Drupal, Education."

Authentication and Identity

This was a topic that I initiated and lead the discussion on and it was inspired by my recent post about my Adventures in Authentication. This is a topic that everyone is interested in but for different reasons. From an educational point of view it seems that Facebook authentication is most important. There's also the issue of schools only wanting verified students and teachers to be able to sign up. Both security and process are very important. My needs are more general. I want to widen access to site features, build community and also cut down on spam and trolls. 

One very good point was made about consistency of the various APIs made available by the social services. It's hard to have consistent authentication and sharing functionality across services (Twitter, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc.) because of differing API functionality. So while you may need different code in order to connect with each service you will also have different feature sets made available. 

Multi Site Support

I have received a number of queries on this site about how to run multiple domains off of a single Drupal install. This is something you might do if you have yoursite.com and want to also add community.yoursite.com, and allow visitors to have the same account across both sites. The Domain Access module was mentioned as a very good module to use for this purpose. A recent Lullabot blog post shows you how to do it without using a contributed module.

Code Management

Code management is very important for those who are managing very complex sites and maintaining multiple environments. For example, a site administrator might have environments for development, test and production. It's a challenge to keep track of code in those situations. The challenges become even greater when you have multiple sites to manage with multiple environments for each site. Drush was mentioned as a tool to help streamline the module update process. I'm drawing a blank on some of the other tools discussed (Note to self: Take notes next time!) but I found a discussion on Drupal groups called Code Deployment and Build Management that includes a few links to useful contributed modules.

Other Topics

The subject of hosting was discussed and most agreed that shared hosting is for the birds. People differed on their preference for hosting providers. Nothing new there. Virtual Private (or Virtual Dedicated) Servers are coming down in cost (Media Temple, $50/mo. | Dreamhost, $25/mo.) and the performance improvements are worth it. When talking hosting I mentioned Acquia's Drupal Gardens which is now in private beta as an option for those who want to get started quickly with minimum technical knowledge. I also introduced the group to the newly released Fusion themes for Drupal. I am using Fusion/Skinr/Acquia Prosper on Learn By The Drop and the combination has really been awesome in helping me organize and redesign the site.

Final Thoughts

Communicating with the world online is great but these offline (aka face-to-face) interactions are so crucial for networking, community building, and knowledge sharing. So I want to thank Julie Johnson from the Kinderhook Memorial Library for organizing the gathering. It's really worth the time that people put into planning and attending these types of Drupal events so consider organizing or attending one in your local area if you have the time.

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