Twin Cities Drupal

Does Drupal support connection pooling,
transaction control,
connect and disconnect connections??

Any thoughts on:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/11/12/are-php-persistent-connec...

Twin Cities

Gorton Studios is looking for a Project Manager with experience, discipline, integrity and excellent communication skills. If that's you and you want to be involved in building websites for great organizations, let's talk! Or, if you know someone who might be a good fit - please forward this on to them!

This is a full-time, on-site position in Eagan, Minnesota.

Full description available at http://www.gortonstudios.com/news/werehiring

Twin Cities

Hey Minnesota Drupalers, just wondering where people are at? Maybe we can schedule some meetups, etc.

I am currently working based out of my home near Glenwood, south of Alexandria. I frequent the Fargo/Moorhead area (colleagues, great web professional & technology scene), as well as St. Cloud, Buffalo (family), and I even get down into the cities now & then. I love heading up to northern MN too, and would love to meet some web geeks from that part of the state! Duluth Drupalers, are you out there??? Bemidji? Iron Range? Detroit Lakes? I-Falls? Represent!

Update: cross-posted to the Twin Cities group too ;)

--
Matt J. Sorenson (emjayess)
d.o. | g.d.o. | WEBJAX'd! | twitter

Twin Cities

Hi All - the next Drupal meeting is coming up soon (August 27th). In our last meeting, we decided to have a question and answer session. However, this is the same time period as Drupalcon. I know that Allie Micka and Barry Madore from Advantage Labs are going to Drupalcon. There is a good chance many other TC Drupal members will be going also. That might mean that many of the people who would answer questions will be gone.

We could go ahead with the Q&A session. Or, we might want to think about having a showcase meeting instead, where members bring their latest websites and show some features of the site. Or - you might have even better suggestions. Let us know what you think!

Thanks!
Bobbi

Twin Cities

We are in a debate as to whether we should use taxonomy or node reference!

Our website enables selling of Products, especially for Schools and Colleges. Users can create products or purchase products on the site. The Products have some categories associated with it.
Has a tree structure, root, L1, L2,L3. Parts of the categories are repetitive.

eg. Books
-- Education
---Physics
---- Grade I
---- Grade II
---- Grade III
---Chemistry
---- Grade I
---- Grade II
---- Grade III
---Biology
---- Grade I
---- Grade II
---- Grade III
-- Fiction
Musical Instruments
--Guitar
--- Electric
--- non Elelctric
--Drums
Games

Is it good to use one Vocabulary to define the tree, one to define the Grade or Class(single) , one for the city...

OR should we go in for Node reference? Use Node reference to create the tree?

My feeling was to go in for OPTION I taxonomy. Taxonomy has so many features enabled along with it. Will get better search enabled and SEO enabled. The Querries will also be more efficient.

Are we in the right direction, should be go ahead with using Taxonomy!

Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/

Twin Cities

Minneapolis is a Drupal hot-bed of activity this summer!

Drupal Daze, sponsored by Open Circuit, is scheduled for July 19th and 20th. Here, you can get 2 days of Drupal education by gurus around the area. Check out the presentation schedule and registration info at http://www.drupaldaze.com.

Advantage Labs is conducting a special 5-week Nonprofit Drupal Website Training Class specifically designed for a small group of nonprofits. It starts Aug 5th and is limited to 8 nonprofit organizations. By the end of the class, each nonprofit will have their own basic website, nonprofit Drupal training AND 6 months of Advantage Lab's Drupal Alliance program. Check out the full details at: Nonprofit Drupal Training: Build Your Own Basic Nonprofit Website.

AND, of course - this group, The Twin Cities Drupal Users Group, where the TC Posse is taking over and doing lightening talks at the TC Drupal User Group meeting on July 23rd. Find out all about TC Posse and their cunning plans at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/12588 .

Hope to see you soon at one or all of these meetings. Stay cool - with Drupal!

Twin Cities

Hey everyone!

Drupal Daze is in a couple weeks. A Drupal 6 website has been created (it's still under construction):
http://drupaldaze.com/

Registration is open (its limited so don't miss out):
http://tcopencircuit.org/drupal_daze

You can see who has already started to sign up for presentations. We still need a few more presenters. Please let us know as soon as possible by using either of the following forms:
http://drupaldaze.com/contact
http://tcopencircuit.org/contact

Also, a few extra hands would be good too. If you volunteer, present, or sponsor Drupal Daze, your registration is free (as in beer).

Your friend in Drupal,
Alan Palazzolo
TC Open Circuit

Twin Cities

It looks like the folks over at the Minnesota Historical Society are looking at Drupal - they've posted a 'Senior Web Developer' job at http://www.mnhs.org/about/jobs/731.html that includes "Experience with open source applications such as Linux, Apache, Drupal, Lucene, Nutch or Solr." amongst it's must-have qualifications.

Disclaimer - I don't know anything more about the job than what's publicly posted. It was posted last week to the TC PHP list, where I spotted it because I know the hiring manager, Rose Sherman, from work I did for the Historical Society ages ago. Rose is a great person and manager - anyone who's interested in working with Drupal (and probably search?) in their day job should take a look. They've got great content and stories to tell as well.

Drew

Twin Cities

Your Drupal site probably has users. Those users are probably doing interesting stuff. Every time they log in, participate in a forum, make a donation, or contact you or someone else; your users are telling you something about themselves. You want to know more about who they are and what they're interested in, and maybe you even want to contact them and ask them to give you some money, business, or time.

You could use a 3rd-party service to keep track of your users and their stuff. This works well for a lot of users, but you also risk creating data islands, where visitors' participation information is segregated from their contact information and you can miss out on the big picture. You're also in the business of updating separate databases and working with disparate service providers, which might not be nearly as much fun as working on your Drupal site. Alternatively, you could use specialized modules like CiviCRM, but in many cases, you can get a lot further with a little configuration and some Drupal savvy. So let's spend this Wednesday night getting savvy with CCK, Views, and Mail integration!

This topic is equal parts presentation and open forum on the strategies, best practices, and pitfalls of using "Native Drupal" as your CRM. I'll cover what I know, what I've worked on, and what could use a little polish. At the end of the evening, you should have a better sense of collecting and querying information about your users, contacting them, and tracking their responses.

Twin Cities

The July Twin Cities Drupal Group meeting will be a special event. The meeting will consist of short lightning presentations instead of the long presentation format.

Over the next few weeks Twin Cities Drupal users will be attempting a "see one, do one, teach one" approach to teaching each other about Drupal.

What does this mean?

See one

Figure out what you want to learn about. Building themes? Fixing bugs? Got a module stuck on Drupal 5? Hopefully somebody will teach you.

Do one

When you know more about how to approach a problem, find others who have the same problem and collaborate.

Teach one

When you see a question asked about Drupal you know the answer to, teach someone. You will be continuously surprised by how much you know and by your capacity to teach others.

Where are people figuring all this out? On the TC Posse wiki!

See, Do, Teach Deliverables:

• Lightning presentations for July group meeting
• Bugs fixed to be submitted to modules and core
• Better understanding of Drupal code
• Building a stronger Drupal ecosystem
• Fun!

Twin Cities

This is a new job posting. We had previously posted a job for a similar position but were unable to hire the right candidate please consider this new posting.

The Science Museum of Minnesota is hiring a Drupal developer to work as part of the team that operates the award wining Science Buzz website and exhibit.
Application deadline: June 25, 2008.

Science Buzz is expanding in many ways. Your Drupal, PHP, and web coding skills will help us:

• develop Mentor Buzz, an online community focusing on the needs of mentors and their students talking about science
• create unique web features focusing on contemporary issues like the 35W bridge collapse, Hurricane Katrina, or even male pregnancy!
• build web enabled exhibits that allow other museums around the country that allow their visitors to hook into the Science Buzz community
• create new tools that help our visitors create content along with us...we like to share authority
• and more...

You should be:

• Comfortable exploring new ways to create web content and user interactions using the Drupal CMS
• Writing custom theme code
• Modifying and developing new modules
• Learning new methods of development as a member of the Drupal community
• Demonstrate experience and aptitude in:
• Development and design of webpages using HTML and CSS
• Programming dynamic web applications using PHP and MySQL
• Manipulating files on remote webservers using FTP, SSH, and basic UNIX commands
• Excited to work in an educational environment where quality code meats engaging learning experiences.

The Science Museum is a fun and exciting place to work with lots of passionate people who care about their jobs.

Read the full description at the Science Museum's jobs site.
Application deadline: June 25, 2008.

Learn more about the Science Museum, Science Buzz, and the museum's webteam.

Email me with any questions at: bkennedy [the at symbol] smm [that little dot] org

Twin Cities

Per the discussions on the Any Interest in Learning How to Code in Drupal? discussion and subsequent meeting, this is our wiki page.

At the meeting, we discussed quite a few things, including how to stay focused, how to make sure we take advantage of the Drupal community as a whole, how to make sure each and every individual gets something valuable from the experience as well as has the opportunity to contribute it back.

Immediate conclusions:

We're taking over the July TC Drupal meeting for a series of 10 minute lightning talks, e.g. theming views, coder module, interacting w/ Drupal.org, writing tests, contributing documentation, taking apart modules, etc. The goal of these talks will be to provide the group with a wide smattering of basics to use as we move forward.

Long term, it would be great to be helping out existing module maintainers by hunting bugs, testing patches, providing docs, tackling feature requests, etc. We'll be tagging our future posts on this subject with 'TC Posse' to call each others attention to them.

See one

Figure out what you want to learn about. Building themes? Fixing bugs? Got a module stuck on Drupal 5? Hopefully somebody will teach you.

Do one

When you know more about how to approach a problem, find others who have the same problem and collaborate.

Teach one

When you see a question asked about Drupal you know the answer to, teach someone. You will be continuously surprised by how much you know and by your capacity to teach others.

As a person reading this post, it's your responsibility to edit it and add. We're looking for:

What do you want to learn? (What would be helpful?)

Writing Tests for Drupal

Samir M. Nassar (SteamedPenguin)

more

Best practices in writing code for Drupal

Proposal: Look over the Read More Tweak module.

The goal is

• Update the code for both Drupal 6 (PHP 4.x and some PHP 5.x compatibility) and Drupal 7 (>=PHP 5.2 only.)
• Organize the code better
• Write documentation
• Make templating easier
• Should this code go into a module like beginning, framework, zen?

Samir M. Nassar (SteamedPenguin)

more

Using a single codebase for multiple sites

Samir M. Nassar (SteamedPenguin)

more

What do you want to present?

Beginning Drupal Hacking with Bazaar

Kyle Cunningham (CitizenKane)

more

Using patch and diff: Becoming a patch tester for modules and core

Samir M. Nassar (SteamedPenguin)

more

Using patch and diff: You found a bug! Now fix it.

Samir M. Nassar (SteamedPenguin)

more

Using the coder module

Samir M. Nassar (SteamedPenguin)

more

Tweaking your site with a module

Custom cosmetic tweaks you can do with APIs when theming doesn't cut it, starring hook_form_alter().

Gabe Ormsby (gormsby)

more

Which of the above are you willing to be the scribe for?

Beginning Drupal Hacking with Bazaar (Kyle Cunningham)

Samir M. Nassar (SteamedPenguin)

more

Turning designs into Zen sub-themes (Samir M. Nassar)

Kyle Cunningham (CitizenKane)

Using patch and diff: You found a bug! Now fix it. (Samir M. Nassar)

Gabe Ormsby (gormsby)

Be a scribe for someone!

more

Presentation list (final)

Bug fixin', it's what we do

Using patch and diff, the coder module to test patches, fix bugs, and help Drupal

Samir M. Nassar

Beginning Drupal Hacking with Bazaar (Kyle Cunningham)

Kyle Cunningham

Tweaking your site with a module

Gabe Ormsby

The themeing with Zen lightning presentation won't be taking place with apologies from Samir Nassar.

Twin Cities

Bonestroo is currently involved in a project in collaboration with the Urban Land Institute to develop a Sustainability Resource Center website. This resource would be used and enhanced by mayors and other local leaders throughout the metropolitan area to share information about implementing sustainable practices in their communities. Ideally, the website would serve as both a clearinghouse for information, as well as a way for leaders to share new tools, resources, ideas and contact information. We currently have a wiki started, but that format is becoming too unorganized and the group has decided they want to proceed with a more formally organized website.

We would need an individual to help us with two things. First, assisting us in estimating the time and cost of developing this tool based on our specific needs. This may require one to two meetings at the Bonestroo office in Roseville, MN. We would use this information to apply for grant funding to begin the project (we have already identified a number of potential sources). Second, once funding is secured, we would need the individual to do the initial set up of the site and assist us with ongoing maintenance. The contract for this work would begin after this grant funding is secured.

Some key features we are looking for in the website:

· The ability for more than one key person to manage the site, i.e. edit pages, add new pages, manage requests and submissions gathered through the website. I have used the Droopal framework before on another project, and found that system especially easy to work with. We may have people editing the site who are unfamiliar with html coding language.

· A method to collect resources/ideas from mayors and other contributors to the site. They should be able to upload documents and describe the resource they are requesting to have included on the site. “Gatekeepers” (see first item) would then review submission and make additions as necessary.

Some longer-term items we may be interested in implementing in the future:

· “Contacts” page, in which mayors and others can fill in their contact information with links to resources they have submitted. This way others are able to easily communicate with those who have expertise in a certain area.

· Virtual tours. Similar to photo slideshows on Flickr, New York Times or other websites. Specific projects would have photo (or video) slideshows that allow site visitors to “tour” a project with text or sound information accompanying the images.

If this work is something you would be interested in, please contact me via email at brendon.slotterback@bonestroo.com. Please supply a resume and examples of other sites you have developed using the drupal system. We are looking for reliable, self-directed individuals. Any background in city planning or sustainable development is a bonus. We have a meeting with the committee working on this project on July 11th, so we’d like to make contact with a web developer ASAP.

Twin Cities

Drupal Daze is a Twin-Cities, two-day, Drupal conference organized by Open Circuit. It will be held on July 19 and 20, 2008 from 10AM to 5PM on each day, and will be at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Official Registration is OPEN! To Register, go here:
http://www.tcopencircuit.org/drupal_daze

For more details, go here:
http://drupaldaze.com/

We are still looking for Presenters.

If you are interested in sponsoring, volunteering, or helping out other than presenting, please contact us through our web form.

Twin Cities

Open Circuit is putting together another Twin-Cities Drupal Conference. This time it's two days. There will be presentations and panel discussions. We invite you all to help us make this a great, accessible Drupal focused conference.

Presentations

We are currently looking for presenters. We have three tracks lined up:

• Drupal Advanced - aimed at people who are already familiar with Drupal basics.
• Drupal Basic - aimed at people who have probably never done anything with Drupal.
• Community Building - about building communities with websites. this does not have to be about Drupal specifically, but is encouraged.

It's looking like we will have 5 slots per track per day (10 total per track).

Panel Discussion

We are also trying to do some panel discussions each day. Each day, one will be focused on Drupal, and the other on community building through websites.

What Kind of People Should Apply

Anyone and everyone. You don't have to be an expert to present. In fact, if you just learned Drupal a month ago and want to talk about that experience, that would be really helpful to lots of people. Presentations can be discussion based, about technical programming, or anything in between.

Details

July 19 and 20, 2008 from 10AM to 5PM at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Registration is open. If you present, you will be able to attend the event for free.

Wiki page with more detailed information can be found here (obviously these are just notes and nothing here is official): http://tcopencircuit.org/wiki/index.php?title=Drupal_Daze

If you have questions or want to present, please use one of the following:

• Use our web form
• Join our mailing list by Getting Involved
• Contact me directly

Twin Cities

This is a social venue to follow up on the Any Interest in Learning How to Code in Drupal? discussion and put together some kind of a road map.

Suggested location: Common Roots cafe in Minneapolis.
When: Tuesday June 17th at 7PM
Address:
2558 Lyndale Ave S
Minneapolis, MN 55405

Get Directions

Twin Cities

We (two students from Germany) are looking for someone familiar with PHP, MySQL and Drupal.

We aim to build a very specific Web 2.0 Community. Die Page should be more focused on information than on fancy design.

Our Drupal 6 installation is running with some added modules which are individualize on a very small scale. As I’m not an expert and would have to spend too much time learning drupal, we need your help! A few things have to be personalized for our platform and modules have to be added/created.

Here are a some features that have to be done:

• User Profile
• Search users on the basis of certain criterias
• Embedding vCard
• Embedding Ubercart (Open Source Shopping Cart)
• Building invitation system for new users
• …..

Physical presence in Germany would be an advantage but telecommuting is also possible.

If you (or someone you know) are interested to participate in creating an innovative Web 2.0 community where you can see your success immediately, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Ruhrgebiet

Apropos to the month's meetup topic, I need a developer to work on a short-term (1-2 months) project implementing Ubercart and doing some integration with CiviCRM. Compensation is $1500-$1900 depending on specific terms of work. Longer description at Craigslist:

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/web/673695569.html

If you are in the Twin Cities area and interested, contact me at 651-442-5734 with questions, or use my contact form to e-mail me a description of your experience with Drupal e-commerce.

Get in touch by May 13 to be considered. If this works well, we probably have more work for you.

Twin Cities