First Local Drupal Meetup for 2017

THIS WAS DONE AS A TASK FOR THE ANNUAL COMPETITION CALLED GOOGLE CODE IN. THIS IS A COMPETITION IN WHICH PRE-UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AGES 13 TO 17 ARE INVITED TO TAKE PART IN GOOGLE CODE-IN, OUR CONTEST INTRODUCING YOUNG MINDS TO THE WORLD OF OPEN SOURCE. WITH A WIDE VARIETY OF BITE-SIZED TASKS, IT’S EASY FOR BEGINNERS TO JUMP IN AND GET STARTED NO MATTER WHAT SKILLS THEY HAVE. MENTORS FROM PARTICIPATING ORGANIZATIONS ARE AVAILABLE TO LEND A HELPING HAND AS YOU LEARN WHAT IT’S LIKE TO WORK ON AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT.

On January 5, 2017 i attended the first Drupal meetup for the year. The meetup started at 5: 30 in the evening and ended 2 hours later.It was a small turn out as there was only five persons at the meetup.  The presentation was also done using a laptop due to the unfortunate problem of the projector not being there.

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Mr. Adrian Gordon Presenting[/caption]

The presenter was Mr. Adrian Gordon. He is a Drupal developer which has very interesting comments on how he find working with Drupal before the update and overall working with the system. In summary his comments can be deduced as, "Drupal is a very versatile tool to use with modules to do anything you want but can be also be time consuming and a pain to work with at times". The presentation was mainly on the new version of Drupal, Drupal 8. It flows with the following order:

• The first thing which was presented was a definition of what Drupal using three definitions along with scenarios.
• After he present on when to use Drupal over another content management system (CMS) like WordPress. Some examples on what he discussed are , if security is needed, if it needs to support a lot of user, if you can’t find a WordPress theme which you like and  if the developer just don’t know WordPress.[caption id="attachment_863" align="alignright" width="303"]

One of the slides[/caption]

• On contrary to  the topic before the following topic was "when not to use Drupal". The details which he used to support his topic are:  when trying to make a website by yourself, When the website is not content base, if you have no money, need to develop fast and if your not sure what the website is needed to do. On the last statement "if your not sure what the website is needed to do" , was disagreed on by one of the attendee, he discussed that when developing with Drupal if you may start with a certain amount of modules to do one thing you may still be able to turn a module or modules on or off if you change you mind from that specific task to do something else. I surely did agreed with him but it also would be time consuming.
• The final which i will discuss that was presented is the new features that are in the new Drupal 8. The features which he specified on are the new WYSIWYG editor, inline editing, content previewing on the front page before you go to content like blogs, the new way to select image from what uploaded before and the new Drupal console

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Sharing our comments after the presentation[/caption]

The  main topic which stood out most for me during the presentation was "What is Drupal and how is it better than other content management system like WordPress". It was a really good meetup for me although it is my first. The presentation was made for people who are new to Drupal as told by the presenter but i did learn something although it wasn't new to me.

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Me listening to fellow developer[/caption]

I learned about the Drupal console. He also exclaimed in his presentation that it was so much easier to use than Drush and it fit right in with the system. Overall it was a very exciting experience to me, meeting other fellow developers and hearing their point of view on the system.