First Frankfurt / Rhein-Main Region Drupal Meetup at Cocomore had Great Turnout

I only realized a few hours before yesterday's Drupal Meetup that I hadn't actually signed up to attend it, and Cocomore was playing host, so of course I wanted to be there. As luck would have it, one of our managers had canceled since he was unexpectedly called out of town, so there was a slot available, but I was surprised to see that we'd filled the “capacity” for the event in online signups and even more surprised that not only did everyone show up, but there were a few extras in attendance.

We have normally had only about half of this turnout for the (formerly) monthly “Drupal Stammtisch” meetings in Frankfurt. I hadn't seen so many people gathered for a local Drupal event since January, when we helped organized the Rhein-Main area’s Drupal 7 release party and, later in the month, hosted a code sprint for module maintainers working to port modules to Drupal 7. In short, we had very good turnout for the Drupal Meetup.

Unlike the normal Stammtisch (which is still held in alternating months), besides the good turnout, the “Meetup” differed in a few other ways, which could have helped attract the crowd:

1. Cocomore gave us free pretzels and beer;
2. Cocomore provided a central location, which also just happened to be very convenient for some of us “Cocomories”, who attended;
3. And there were three presentations on Drupal-related topics — at the Stammtisch evenings, we simply sit and socialize in a nice bar with WiFi access, but with no private room or video projector.

The Stammtisch evenings are great, don't get me wrong — it was at the Drupal Stammtisch last August that I first met some of my soon-to-be Cocomore colleagues, who encouraged me to offer my CV and join Cocomore, which has been a great experience — but it's hard to do much more than socialize at the Stammtisch events. So there isn't normally a whole lot of learning or knowledge transfer going on.

Our evening started with everyone taking turns to provide a brief introduction, before Carsten Logemann began the first of three presentations, which provided introductory-level coverage of the Rules module in conjunction with Drupal Commerce, a good example of a module which implements the Rules API. Rules is more than just a Drupal module; it offers an API to build Rules support into any other module. Carsten provided many useful examples of Rules coverage, the plan being that in December, when we have the next Drupal Meetup, we will build on that discussion of Rules to discuss more advanced features.

The second presentation, given by Denis Roy of Azri, was a case study of a complex Drupal 6-based local government site, a sector in which Drupal is becoming increasingly popular. This particular site is based on Pressflow (a popular performance-enhanced Drupal distribution) with Varnish a popular caching system which enhances performance and page delivery far beyond what Drupal's internal caching can provide. They also use Piwik web analytics, integrated with the Piwik module; Piwik is an open-source alternative to Google Analytics which offers a number of benefits, including “real-time” reports, local analytics data, and a high level of customization options. The site also uses the Views Slideshow module (coincidentally, the same solution we use on this site to provide the front-page image rotation) and a nice implementation of print-to-PDF, based on wkhtmltopdf, which I particularly like; you can select articles on the site from one central form and choose any or all of them to bundle into one custom PDF that’s generated on-demand… very cool!

Our third presentation, given by one of Cocomore’s Drupal theming experts, Philip Boenisch, covered the use of jQuery Mobile with Drupal 6 for good HTML5-based delivery, Ajax requests, animations associated with navigation, and other super-cool features. The benefits include “near native-app” performance and features, support for a very wide range of mobile devices, nice performant content delivery. The case study for the website he demonstrated involved use of the jQuery Mobile UI module, Mobile jQuery theme, a custom theme, the Mobile tools module, and Views.

Following the three presentations, we had informal socializing for some time. It was a great opportunity to catch up with many of the local Drupalistas who I hadn't seen in a while. All in all, the evening was productive, informative, and fun and I hope that our next Meetup will be just as awesome!