I went to my first St. Louis Drupal user group meeting last night. What a pleasure it was to meet and discuss some of the problems I wrestle with daily with some like-minded individuals in person. I've been making sites using Drupal for about 7 years now and I think these were the first people I've met who work with Drupal. I guess I'm a lone wolf.
And I am, so to speak. Of the 7 who attended I think I was the only one who designs and develops Drupal sites independently. All but one other, unless I'm mistaken, was employed in a regular career type job with Drupal responsibilities. I found that sort of interesting.
We didn't have a set agenda, per se. Two of the attendees had recently attended DrupalCon in San Francisco. Much of the discussion stemmed from the various sessions they'd attended. I'd say the one thing I learned from that part of the proceedings was that I am doing a better than fair job of keeping myself informed about the goings on with Drupal. Many of the issues raised, such as maintaining and migrating sites, and rolling new functionality and updates into active sites were in keeping with my own perception of what's important and what needs addressing.
Most valuable for me, however, were a couple of discussions that happened later in the evening. One in particular made the whole evening worthwhile for me.
I'm a big believer in a Drupal module called Views. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it. Everyone who works with Drupal, however, knows Views. It's indispensable. I consider myself something of an expert on Views. I'm no rock star, but I know my way around it pretty well.
Or I thought I did anyway. One of the women at the meeting was showing one of the sites she'd developed and I noticed she had some of her content arranged nicely behind tabs on a page. I told her I'd done that myself, but that I was wary of using that add-on module in too many sites. She replied that her tabs weren't from any module but Views. My jaw must have hit the floor.
She saw my shock and offered to show me where it's done. I was blown away. There it was, right there in front of my nose; but I simply had never seen it.
So now I'm a little smarter, and just a little faster and better at working with Views than I was before. That easily balances the time spent. All the rest - meeting people who also work with Drupal, and sharing / swapping stories - is just icing on the cake.
