January meeting summary

Great to see everyone last night. Thanks to all those who made it, braving the weather. If this rain keeps up boats may be needed to get to the next meeting.

A few of the topics raised through the night:

1. Again Rohan's http://goingbackhome.org project is moving ahead. We only briefly touched on progress, but it seems presales of the booklets for hospitals are strong. Check out http://devel.goingbackhome.org/ for ways to get involved and keep a track of progress.
2. The step of getting into Drupal for the first time. Can be quite overwhelming. Mentioned stepping through creating a new sub theme off of http://drupal.org/project/zen - great documentation to get you started.
3. http://foundation.zurb.com/ "An easy to use, powerful, and flexible framework for building prototypes and production code on any kind of device. Start here, build everywhere." - Looks like a powerful yet slim framework for rapid prototyping. Targeted at responsive design with quite a few nice additions like overlays, form/button stying and more.
4. Designing for Mobile. The next drupalcon's tagline is "Collaborative Publishing for Every Device". Publishing for mobile is here and will just get bigger.
   "Responsive design" is one solution. Perhaps the buzz word for 2012. The book is still being written, but its manifesto was laid out by Ethan Marcotte in http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/ - There's been some interesting posts of the planet of late:
   1 http://friendly-machine.com/posts/2012/drupal-responsive-theme-review
   2 http://friendly-machine.com/posts/2012/drupal-mobile - mobile vs responsive
   3 http://thinkshout.com/blog/2012/01/andrea/thinkshouts-site-redesign-and-... - a real world redesign with a Omega.
   Also, a great site for testing responsive designs: http://mattkersley.com/responsive/
5. We look through Jamie's standard d7 drush_make file to get a look at some common d7 modules. Some that spring to mind:
   1 http://drupal.org/project/modernizr - Great font development tool, a js library that helps you take advantage of some new web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5). It helps to smooth cross browser development with these emerging standards.
   2 http://drupal.org/project/sassy - CSS done right. For anyone who's ever written a CSS file over 50 lines long you'll know some of the pain points of CSS development. Sass - Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets tries to help this and give you and is a superset of CSS which ads in the ability to use variable, nesting, mixins and selector inheritance. The sassy module automatically compiles SASS / SCSS files on your Drupal site. It's an alternate to somewhat dated http://drupal.org/project/sass and includes some nice feature additions such as theme integration.
6. The perennial panels/context/ds discussion.
7. Config/content management with drupal.org/project/features. The configuration management initiative in D8 looks very promising http://groups.drupal.org/build-systems-change-management/cmi
8. Jamie mentioned a new client management site he's building in rails, aimed at developers to help them managing clients/servers/sites/etc. I can't recall the url? Still early days, but an interesting project, sure we'll hear more.

Just some of the topics that came up.

On another note this will be my last meetup for a while. I'm heading back to Chile, taking work back on the road. I'd be great to keep in touch with the group, I'll still have a local connection thanks to my work partner Jonathan who'll continue attending the meetups.

So good luck to all, see you out there.

Cheers, Saul