I never did post a follow up to the first meetup which had eight people, (counting myself) show up. Tonights meetup had 12, including the new maintainer of the TinyMCE (Kevin Reynen) module who drove all the way from Reno, NV (which is nuts but who am I to talk) with his wife. It's a great thing he's done for the community taking on the module which is very popular and a very thankless task.
We were hoping Dan Nguyen who did the new Scoopy Tube website would come but evidently he didn't make it or couldn't find us and Ben Shell unfortunately couldn't make it at the last minute.
On the bright side we had lots of others come by, including Jordan Jones who found out about the meetup because he needed a jump for his car and his friend, Chad Jones, (I really hope I got that order right) mentioned the meetup. Ironically he had just installed his first Drupal site the other day and worked down the street from Chili's.
We had a good mix of new, mid level and experienced Drupal folks and it looks like were going to be growing a bit because I know at three more Drupal hobbyists and one professional (Kitt) who didn't come out are in the area as well.
Caleb Gilbert will be scheduling the next meetup. Next time it won't be in a restaurant as Jonathan Lambert and Aaron Stewart of Firebright want to do a presentation / demo of how to performance test Drupal sites. We'll have to do a pot luck or something.
Bill Mead, who is doing web sites locally using Drupal, Joomla, etc stopped by (he was at the first meetup too) and is wanting to improve his knowledge of Drupal for use with his work. It was good to have him again.
Jay Verdan and James Todd are looking at Drupal from a newspaper world perspective. Chad Jones on the other hand decided to use Drupal for an eCommerce site as his entry point to the Drupal world
Between the two of us Jonathan and I certainly filled a lot of the conversation but I am hoping that people got value out of it and different perspective on the Drupal community. There was some excellent wide ranging discussion on the Drupal community, drupal.org, OpenID, a logon issue that involved domain info in Apache that Caleb Gilbert helped resolve with logon's and mentioned that the patch was in the 5.x series patch queue for when 5.2 is released. How Kevin accidentally became the maintainer of TinyMCE. Shawn DeArmond mentioned porting his site from WordPress to Drupal last week..
Another big subject was improving the information available to new end users about modules and such. I mentioned all the work to prepare and pave the wave for this done by dww but didn't have all the information available. dww's post is here for what is done and what still needs to be done. It's amazing how much work so often goes on that unless you are following the mail list and community is just invisible and one day, just appears.
I need to actually take notes and not rely on my after meeting brain dumps as I am sure I missed a lot and got things wrong. It was a lot of fun and I had no idea there were this many folks in the area.. Having driven to the San Fransisco Bay area for meetups I understand why Kevin drove the distance. We'll have to try and schedule the next one to help accommodate his ability to come out. The online community is great, but it's still fantastic to actually get to meet people face to face and share ideas, perspective and resources.
If you're in the area and haven't stopped by the groups site and signed up, then do so soon. It looks like we have a real nice diversity of folks, from the power sites to the new folks to keep us all challenged and interested in a wide variety of topics.
Many of us are going to the OSCMS conference next month so that should be a blast too.
A note about the venue, Chili's was great. We had the greatest waitress for a large group and I neglected to get her name. I need to send a nice letter to them saying nice things about their staff. Companies don't get enough nice things said about them when they do a good job especially when you show up at 6:30pm and say you have a group of 10 showing up at 7pm.
