September 2014 Meetup

This month's meetup includes talks on Drupal backup processes, writing custom Views handlers and extending the Views module, plus round table discussions.

In the afterglow of DrupalCamp Colorado, some of us got together to organize our meetups for the rest of the year. Universally, our best meetings have something for everyone: for someone who has barely touched Drupal to the expert developer. We're hoping this meeting fulfills that expectation.

Drupal backups. With a content management system, you've got to think about backing up code, databases, files and more. Caleb Thorne will demo a backup alternative he likes for his personal sites. Bring your favorite backup alternatives and we can compare and contrast.

Views: introduction to writing views handlers. Views (just think of lists of stuff) are one of the most powerful features of Drupal. Non-technical content managers can easily get intimidated by Views. Rick Nashleanas will start our discussion by introducing views and creating a couple of basic views from scratch. Then, we'll explore more advanced features of views.

Finally, Rick hopes to pull in one of the Monarch developers to show how we wrote views handlers to expose custom data for reporting.

Time and location. We're at the basement conference room of the Old Colorado City library. We have the room from 6:30 to 8:30. (We will try to start right at 6:30 and finish at 8.)

Food and drinks. (We can't have food in the library without paying a fee.) So if you'd like to grab a bite, we'll meet up at Front Range Barbeque, http://www.frbbq.com , at about 5:30.

Agenda for the rest of the year. At our organizing meeting, we came up with a tentative agenda for most of 2014:

• October: Testing and Behat

• November: Lightning talks*

• December: TBA

• Think about a 5 to 10 minute talk about something you've been working on to share. Not much prep. Very informal. But very valuable. We want intro sessions and very advanced talks. There will be prizes.