Another good Drupal Meetup here at Cocomore

This Thursday, 9 December, Cocomore hosted the Frankfurt/Rhein Main region’s third Drupal Meetup, which again was a success with a decent turnout.

Walter Ebert gave a first presentation which offered a comparison of Wordpress and Drupal. He has extensive experience with Wordpress and has only recently started working with Drupal, so he was able to explain some of the current strengths and weaknesses of the most popular simple CMS, which is ready for blogging “out-of-the-box” If all you want is a site with simple content (e.g. a blog), Wordpress is still a better choice, but Drupal obviously offers a lot better options when you want more and is much better documented. Walter’s made his slides available online for anyone who would like to get an overview of his presentation.

The next presentation was by Dr. Christoph Breidert, the head of a consulting and hosting service, 1xINTERNET, who gave a presentation about how his company uses Drupal multi-sites to provide custom hosting services.

Carsten Müller, a developer here at Cocomore, then gave us an introduction to creating and managing installation profiles using the Profiler library, which greatly streamlines the development of installation profiles and sub-profiles. This is well worth taking a look at since writing an installation profile by hand can take a lot of time.

And finally Florian Weber gave a short demonstration of his Etherpad Lite project, a module still in his “sandbox” (so still in the early stages of development), which integrates the Node.js-based Etherpad Lite collaborative editing environment into a Drupal 7 site. The experience is REALLY real-time in that participants see what another user is typing, as they are typing it. So it can be used for chat, but also for simple multi-user edits of a basic Wysiwyg document. One really cool feature is the “timeline” which allows you to scroll forward and backward through versions which are snapshots of practically every keystroke. His module is simple to configure, and adding its iFrame to a Drupal page is as easy to add to a page or content type as any other simple field. It’s also possible to configure the field to be “read-only”, so that only privileged users can edit the page, but others can view it. As should be expected from a Sandbox project, the module still has some rough edges (the permissions settings didn’t quite work as expected in his demo), but its potential is exciting and intriguing. This demonstration got a lot of attention from the everyone present.

The next Rhein-Main region Drupal Meetup will be in February (January will be our old standard Stammtisch at the kp-21 since we alternate months between having a meetup with presentations and a Stammtisch, with socializing). Write it in your calendars now (the second Thursday) and be sure to join us then.