A tale of six cities - virtual mega Meetup

The Meetup

The Meetup brought together Drupal Meetups from Melbourne, Wellington, Adelaide, Canberra, Auckland and Sydney, with many remote guests also joining.

The Melbourne Meetup was hosted at the Accenture office in the CBD. We started it a little earlier than usual, at 5pm AEDT, to line up with New Zealand’s time zone and the first NZ presentation.

The presentations

The first presentation was from Wellington. Thomas Murphy presented a case study on building a custom LMS product for Spark, using the Drupal/Opigno distribution. Opigno is an open source e-learning platform based on Drupal for managing online training. (We’re actually using Opigno for GovCMS onboarding training.)

Melbourne was next, with some updates on what's happening in the Drupal Association. Owen Lansbury, Chair of the DrupalSouth Steering Committee, gave an update on some of the local and global initiatives for DrupalSouth, including events, learning opportunities, focal points for their efforts, and raising awareness for the Drupal community.

The last speaker was from Brisbane, Vladimir Roudakov. Vladimir is a solution architect, Drupal developer and educator. He gave a live demonstration on how to use the Token module in Drupal 8. He went through a few use-cases for the module, given Token is one of the top three most popular modules in Drupal. It’s also a requirement for using Pathauto, the module used to generate URL aliases.

You can view the recording for the presentations on the DrupalSouth YouTube channel:

Feedback

Overall, the feedback was positive for this second virtual Meetup. The format allows each Meetup group to come together and share quality content. However, it did make it harder for people in the room to interact and discuss issues. As such, we plan on running this type of virtual Meetup once every third Meetup.

We also got feedback from some of the attendees that they’d like the Melbourne Drupal Meetup to focus on help with Drupal issues and/or learning Drupal. We plan on doing this more in the future, with mini hackathons or code contribution sessions.

If you have any feedback or suggestions on what you’d like to see for future meetups, please contact kristy.devries@salsadigital.com.au.

Sign up to your local Drupal Meetup group to get involved in the community:

• Melbourne

• Sydney

• Drupal ACT

• Brisbane

• Gold Coast

• Drupal WA

• Hobart

• Wellington

• Auckland