In this session we talked about Drupal in general, and a few people, including Margaret Rosas from Santa Cruz Geeks and CrystalMarie, got it installed and running. I have to apologize for being a bit incoherent; I was tired and unprepared. It was worth the session anyway to introduce the idea that you *can* run drupal on your laptop and use your laptop for development and testing! Margaret and others saved the day by having plenty to say about Drupal, Drupal 6 modules like Original Groups, what will be new in Drupal 7, and how interesting the process has been for re-organizing the Drupal web site.
If I had do-overs, here’s how I’d run this session:
– First of all, have already rewritten Installing Drupal on a local MAMP setup to improve its instructions.
– Quick description of what Drupal is. Show drupal.org site.
– Quick introductions around the room.
– Pass around a few USB drives with zipped MAMP and Drupal files, with versions 5 and 6, for people to install and copy over to their laptops.
– Pass out a printout of Installing Drupal on a local MAMP setup.
– Ask people to team up in pairs.
– Give an overview of the install process, but without doing it.
– Then everyone is free to do the install.
– People who get it installed should then go around the room and help other people get it done.
– Mention IRC, #drupal-support, drupalchix, and drupal.org documentation as good resources.
We ran into various difficulties. Some people had file permissions problems; it worked to make the entire drupal directory and all its files and directories readable and writeable, though that seems less than ideal. Also, we had some difficulty doing the first login, which I’m still going through with Laura from Indie Craft Gossip.
Thanks to everyone who participated! I didn’t take down your names, but if you want to comment and link back to your blog or Twitter or your company, I’d love it. Also, if you’re in the Bay Area and want to hang out messing around with Drupal, ping me and let’s have a Drupalchix meetup sometime in February.