waterloo region

One of the most difficult hurdles for new members of the Drupal community to overcome is making the jump from a "user" to a "contributor". Many associate "contributor" with core hackers, PHP gurus, and CSS wizards. In reality, any Drupal user or site builder can easily become a contributor, through support, advocacy, documentation, and so on. For more information, check out the attached slides, or see the Drupal.org Contribution page.

Yesterday I gave a presentation to the Waterloo Region Drupal User Group about the basics of using Subversion to manage a Drupal website. Most of the presentation applies to any use of Subversion, though I do touch on a few specifics relating to Drupal. If you're interested in learning about using version control to manage any website or project, this is a great place to start.

Tonight I gave the Waterloo Region User Group a presentation introducing jQuery and it's use within Drupal websites. Topics covered included:

• What JavaScript is and isn't
• How JavaScript empowers developers to transform web pages into web applications
• Why many developers have avoided JavaScript in the past, and how jQuery addresses those issues
• JavaScript developer tools
• Introduction and live demos using jQuery

Tonight I gave a presentation to the Waterloo Region User Group about choosing a host for a Drupal based site. We talked about the essential requirements on top of the Drupal requirements, types of hosting, and our experiences with various hosts. I think the results of the discussion can be summed up as "you get what you pay for"! I've attached the presentation slides for anyone interested.

The essential features I noted as being important include: