The Philly Meetup @ZivTech was huge! There were roughly 50 people that showed up, way more than anyone was expecting. They hadn't had a meetup for a while so it came as a surprise, but it worked out just fine. The ZivTech office was a little crowded, but after splitting the large group up into 'beginner' and 'advanced' groups, things flowed a little more smoothly.
Jerad Bitner, our CTO, had the privilege of leading the beginner session which was held upstairs in the ZivTech loft, where their extremely awesome 'beer wench' was put to good use. This was actually a bucket attached to a winch that can be hoisted to the upstairs loft easily filled with multiple six packs of beer! After getting a few hoisted up, and attaching a laptop to the huge plasma screen, everyone went around the room and re-introduced themselves and said one thing that we would like to learn. After getting a good feel for what each participant wanted to know, Jerad took them through an overview of installing themes, modules and the typical places to go to install and configure these, as well as some of the popular modules and tools in use today for site building in Drupal. He even snuck a little Aegir in on them which lit up a few eyeballs around the room.
The advanced group downstairs had a projector setup and started off with a presentation by RWD's very own Daniel Packer, on a pet project of his which is a command line tool for Drupal allowing creation and manipulation of nodes within command line. He is calling the tool Drupal Shell, which immediately was confused for Drush, a command line tool for Drupal that allows for the management of many administration functions within Drupal. He quickly proved that his tool was quite different and after fielding a few questions about that, he actually mentioned the possibly of making his tool into an extension of Drush. Several server administrators in the downstairs group were very eager to get their hands on a usable module, or Drush extension. Very cool stuff Daniel!
The second presentation was done on Apache Solr by ZivTech's Jody Hamilton. Jody discussed some of the reasons why a company would want to use Apache Solr over Drupal's built in search. She also fielded some more specific questions about how Apache Solr's hardware setup is, and went into more detail about some of it's features. There was quite a bit of Q & A after the two main presentations which covered many topics from multimedia, to handling large Drupal server deployments at local universities.
After the presentations, we began a session focused on planning out DrupalCamp Philadelphia, dubbed, Drupaldelphia. There was a lot of discussion of what would be the best venue to house the event, possible sponsorship ideas, and how to split up the groups of different Drupalers who are planning to attend. There are plans to put together a nice questionairre for those attending to streamline the process of planning the groups and presentations throughout the day. For more information on the upcoming Drupal Camp Philadelphia in May, a.k.a. Drupaldelphia, check out the website.
Keep an eye on what else is happening in the Philly area within the Drupal community at the Philadelphia Area Drupal group.
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