Here are the notes I took from my first NYC Drupal Meetup.  I highly recommend the group.  I learned an enormous amount, I got to see the legendary Earl Miles, and the space where it’s held is nothing short of breathtaking (think Hudson River views + floor to ceiling windows).    

Drupal NYC Meetup 5/13/09   

 Speakers:

• Ezra Gildesgame
• Earl Miles (merlinofchaos)
• George Weiner, CTO of dosomething.org

 Nodequeue The nodequeue module can:

• Keep track of how to notify users
• Be used for granular permissions:
  • Ex: separate editors for designers, developers, admins
• Works very well with Nodes and Panels
• You can create Views specific to one queue
• Recently added international support
• You can have a MAX SIZE to the nodequeue
  • Once you’ve exceeded the max, the oldest story will be kicked out.
  • That’s why nodequeue works so well for lead stories
• USE CASE:
  • Say you are a media site.  You write three blog posts
  • By default, they are all promoted to the front page, without any inherent way to order them
  • If you want to give them a particular ordering to control how/where they are displayed, you can put them in a Nodequeue.  All will have links at the bottom
    • Every nodequeue automatically has a related view.  Now you can reorder the items in the queue for the front page
    • http://dosomething.org ’s frontpage contains a Flash rotator that grabs content (the top 5 stories) out of a nodequeue

  Nodequeue questions from the audience: Q: Can you use it with the Flag module?A: Usually they are separate Smartqueue API:

• Can create a queue for any type of data
• Good to use with groups
• You can have lots of queues that are clones of each other

Views module:

• Views gives you a custom listing of content without needing to write a Database query

  Panels 3  

• Do not use Panels 2 module
• Panels 3 beta, while still buggy, is highly recommended
• Full demo is available at: http://panels.demo.logrus.com
  • User/pass is demo/demo
  • refreshes every hour so don’t be afraid to edit it and mess around
  • Earl spent more time writing the headlines on this demo than he did building the site

• Panels have an idea of context
• You can embed multiple Views in Panels
• You can give your users a different landing page based on what region they are in
• There is a Taxonomy Term View in Panels:
  • View is set to take arguments
  • Passes URLs to views embedded in the Panels
• Panels4:
  • Aim is to support a way to get rid of Blocks all together, and only use Panels 
•  You can take individual CCK fields and stick them anywhere on the Panel.  You will need the individual Node context
• Upcoming:
  • A patch is coming that will allow you to change the color of ALL the panels at once
  • You will also be able to control the rounded corners! (SWEET!)
• SONY uses Panels for their site http://myplay.com  
• Flexible Layout feature of Panels:
  • Flashy, good to impress a client.  Hard to maintaing.  As sexy as this is, you’d probably never use this on a real site
  • Generates all the <div> tags for you; there are no <tables>
  • Uses Holy Grail
  • Uses dynamic CSS
  • Generates some pretty ugly markup b/c it uses very specific names so things can cascade
• Your theme can provide layouts to panels
• Your theme can provide layouts & styles
  • May want to check out the Chrysalis theme

Panels questions from the audience:Q: Why didn’t you work together with the Buzzer team? They seem to have done something similarA: I got a demo from Jeff and Ed after they did it.  I wish they called me up beforehand and worked with me, but they needed something in a hurry.  I don’t recommend using it, since if there are any errors in your PHP, you can simultaneously crash both your page AND your editing mechanism  Case Study: dosomething.org George Weiner – CTO Modules used:

• CCK
• Nodequeue
• Views
• Feed API
• WidgetBox
  • Their drop-down menus and RSS feed are both nice, quick Widgets
• Taxonomy
  • Their “Act Now” is pure Taxonomy
  • List of exactly what they want, custom generated View
• helpqueue
  • For making good help tickets and getting people answers faster

About the Organization:

• Target is teenagers
• “Jonas” is an SEO home run
  • “When the Jonas Brothers are on Oprah, it’s all over”
• Their largest spikes in traffic:
  • mention on PerezHilton: #1
  • front page of AOL.com: #2
  • CNN mention: #3

Tech:

• “No dead ends”
  • Always have Blocks with related links at bottom; this helps with SEO b/c it counts up the total # of links
• URL Construction is so important: TRAIN YOUR PEOPLE TO USE 3 STRONG KEYWORDS 
  • Use in the body
  • Use in the Title
  • Use in the URL
• Lots of their site is built by teenage volunteers the CTO has trained
• TinyMCE is a nightmare
• Started hosting with Dreamhost — NOT HAPPY with them
• Now with rackspace, really like them.
  • RACKSPACE CONTACT:  Caleb Groom, Level III Technician
• Host all video on blip or youtube
• Ran it off one server
  • 60,000 uniques in a day
• If you have an Oprah moment, you need varnish (caching proxy service):
  • “Squid on steroids”
  • Aggressive caching
  • mirrored it; set up a proxy
  • Runs in front of Apache
  • First goes to CDN (content delivery network) to try and get the cache first

Cool Features:

• Teenagers can text them at 30655
  • dosomething.org will text them back with a list of things they can do within their geographic region (do this based on ZIP CODE not GPS)
  • 1 in 5 teenagers that receive a text back takes an action
  • Uses Feed API for this

   Other groups/items mentioned:

• funny garbage is hiring
• mustardseed media –>pull from twitter; integrates with Views
• D4D Boston

2 Responses to “Notes from the Drupal NYC Meetup 5/13/09”

1. vache says:

   May 31, 2009 at 1:12 am

   so funny, i went to the last meeting at poly, and it was not that interesting, well the rooms i went to were not that hot, but whats even more funny is that you are using wordpress, rock on
2. am says:

   May 31, 2009 at 10:31 pm

   Haha. Yes, hopefully my use of WordPress on my blog won’t get me banned from future Meetups!

   You should definitely come to the June meetup!