CDMUG February 2012 Meet Up - Case Studies

February's meetup will not be too technical, but more of an overview from 3 perspectives.

Duo Consulting opens doors at 6:00pm for attendees to arrive, socialize, and hang out before meetups. We try for presentations to officially start by 7:00pm. Comment your RSVP with full name and bring photo ID to gain authorized access to Duo's office downtown.

Presentations:

My First Drupal Site: A Post Mortem by Nathan Peters .net2Drupal: A Liberating Adventure by C.B. Ladd Beans in D7: When View Blocks Won't Cut It by Brant Wynn Nathan Peters is a front-end designer/developer who's worked in video games and on nationally recognized brands like Kraft, Disney & Crown Imports. His philosophy is "less is more" and strives to achieve elegance through simplicity in his work.

C.B. Ladd was a desktop and web application developer (using the .NET framework). He has recently accepted a Drupal challenge: port a small business's basic/html site into Drupal and let the chips fall where they may.

Brant Wynn is a Solutions Architect working for Promet Source. He has worked on Drupal projects for everything from start-ups to multi-national corporations. He is actively involved in the documentation of the Bean API on Drupal.org and is an advocate for bicycle safety and awareness in Chicago.

Estimated Agenda:
6:00 - Doors Open
6:30 - Meetup Starts, Arrival, and Socialize
7:00 - Presentation: First Drupal Site - Nathan Peters
7:45 - Presentation: .net2Drupal - C.B. Ladd
8:15 - Presentation: BEANs in D7 - Brant Wynn
8:45 - Questions, Answers, Closing/Wrap Up
9:00 - Beer @Dick's Last Resort (http://www.dickslastresort.com/) (315 N Dearborn St (http://maps.google.com/maps?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&oe=utf-8&ie=UTF8&q=dick%27s+last+resort&fb=1&gl=us&hq=dick%27s+last+resort&hnear=Chicago,+IL&cid=0,0,18147764509443110714&z=16&iwloc=A))

The Chicago Drupal Meet Up Group is proud to present at least two featured presentations about the hottest Drupal topics each month. We have room for 75 people and all skill levels are welcomed. If you are brand new to Drupal we recommend attending one of our free monthly training workshops.

Nathan Peters will be presenting....My First Drupal Site - A Post Mortem....Join me as I dive into the div and class infested waters of Drupal. Don't worry though, the water's fine! We'll learn how to plan for a Drupal site, see how easy it really is to create a site and pick up a few tips from my experience developing with Drupal.

CB Ladd will be presenting....net2Drupal: A Liberating Adventure....the more I peel back the Drupal onion, the more I like it. I didn't do jack with it when I got started a couple of years ago... then I left my .NET job a few weeks ago and fired up a machine I hadn't used in a while... got into a panic that I wan't doing anything worth anything and built a few Drupal sites over the course of as many days... Drupal is it for me now... I'll never go back to .NET... It's so EASY!

Brant Wynn will be presenting....Using Beans in D7 - When Views Blocks Won't Cut It!....The Bean module turns blocks into entities in Drupal 7. This presentation will give a high level overview of beans and how anyone can use them in their projects. Even those uncomfortable writing module code can use the bean user interface to create custom, re-usable block types.

Almost every CDMUG presentation is recorded and now available online @ http://cdmug.org/videos

If you are not able to physically attend, join us virtually in our #cdmug IRC chat room on freenode. Members hang out in the chat room on a daily basis even when meetups are not happening. If you are unfamiliar with IRC view http://drupal.org/irc feel free to utilize our web based chat client @ http://cdmug.org/chat

All meetups will be in traditional CDMUG fashion. No dress code, relaxed attitudes, open ideas, laptop encouraged, remember business cards, and we will probably go for a beer afterward.

Contact us if you are interested in presenting, have ideas for the group, have any type of feedback - http://cdmug.org/contact or follow us on twitter @ twitter.com/cdmug