RWD at the Maryland Drupal Meetup

Tonight about twenty drupal users and developers gathered at PMG Direct headquarters in Columba, MD for what is believed to be the third Maryland Drupal Meetup. It was my first time, and I met with some of the group beforehand for dinner, which was organized by Carolyn, a developer with Takoma Park based drupal shop, Grand Junction Design.

The vibe was friendly and people got to chatting about Drupal right away before the presentations started. The first was an overview of the development of online model train shop MTH Trains which makes very heavy use of ddblock (for rotating image content), Acquia's hosted Solr service (for faceted search), and themekey (for separate themes for sub-sites based on path). Noted by the devs were that Acquia is having a hard time reaching their promised SLAs due to limited staff and high demand, and are bringing on new staff. The site has 10 search slices within Acquia search for it's massive product catalog, and is generally happy with the service but sometimes hits performance bottlenecks due to timeouts. Local developer Todd Holden suggested the boost module for caching product listing pages, and I mentioned that Apache Solr is an open source project, and that anyone with the inclination (and sysadmin resources) can host their own solr search.

The second presentation was given by yours truly on a certain pet project of mine -- the unfortunately named Drupalshell (not to be confused with drush, which is an actual drupal module with actual users that does system configuration management on the command line). Drush deals with configuration (and more recently user management), while my project attempts to address content (node) management. While I initially intended my project as a way to bring text based web sites online (harkening back to the BBS era), it's become clear that this could be used to extend the power of the *NIX command line to drupal content for processing, import/export, and automation beyond what node_import can do. The question is whether or not to become a drush extension or not. I'll be setting up a discussion to get some opinions on this in the near future. Several people reached out to me who were interested in participating in the project, just as several people did at the Philly drupal meetup. This tells me it's time to move this from the prototype stage to the project stage! Yes, I will also be renaming my project! A somewhat related project that I've noticed but not really explored is terminal.

There were some great discussions after the presentations. Lullabot's buzzr (buzzr President Liza Kindred is on the RWD team) hosted drupal service was compared with Acquia's new Drupal Gardens. Someone asked about quick tabs, and I mentioned that powerful ajax tabs also exist for CCK forms in CCK fieldgroup tabs and that multistep provides a save-as-you go interface to long CCK content types. There were also discussions on Open Publish, and local drupalista Todd Holden was encouraged to give a presentation on Aegir, which he has successfully used on a project to manage drupal deployments. Hopefully he'll give one next time after some "house cleaning". Someone presented a challenge to me about stale search indexes and we got fairly in depth with the Zend Framework and came up with a potential solution using nodeapi to update stale nodes as needed within the site module.

That's all for now. Maybe I'll see you at a meetup in your town!