North West Drupal User Group

The July NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 3rd at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Matt Smith who will be talking about Omega.

Omega, one of the most popular contributed themes has had a facelift, and it’s almost unrecognisable! Omega 4 has done away with the UI and instead, focuses on providing a framework aimed at themers who want full control over the theme through code. This presentation will demonstrate these new features along with real life examples of how you can use them to build highly customised themes. We’ll also take a look at the future of Omega 4 and the roadmap to a full release.

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

If you are interested then please sign up at meetup.com.

The June NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 5th at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Chris Maiden (@matason) who will be talking about Behat.

If Chris stays on track, he'll be talking about Behaviour Driven Development - what it is and why it's useful, he should also be talking about Behat - the PHP framework that makes BDD possible in projects such as Drupal. He'll also demonstrate how to get Behat set up using Composer and will walk through some simple usage examples.

If he strays off course he'll likely be talking about testing more generally, ranting about untestable code and extolling the virtues of Vi… heaven help us!

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

If you are interested then please sign up at meetup.com.

The May NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 1st at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have John Cleary (@TheRealBifter) who will be giving a talk called 'Your User Stories Are Bad And You Should Feel Bad'.

Writing User Stories should be a walk in the park, but all too often the stories we write are too long, are difficult to validate or worst of all appear to add little value to the project.

So what makes a good story? Who should be involved in writing user stories – and should steer well clear of the whole process? Is the story a suitable size? Too small and the stories end up being dependant on one another – too large and they becomes difficult to prioritise and may not fit into your iteration.

Come along and get some practical take-home advice on how to write better stories – there's even a happy ending!

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

If you are interested then please sign up at meetup.com.

The April NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 3rd at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

For the April NWDUG we have Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane) who will be talking about REST for Web Developers.

REST is a term filled with hype and promise, but is it anything more than JSON and pretty URLs? This session tells you everything you need to know about working with REST and implementing it yourself, with a quick tour through verbs, headers, status codes and content types. There will be real examples of making requests using different verbs and data formats, and how to cope when things go wrong (it happens, even in REST!). Expect lots of examples and practical advice in this session that will help developers, architects and technical leads alike.

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

If you are interested then please sign up at meetup.com.

The March NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 6th at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

For the March NWDUG we have Mark West (@markwestuk) who will be talking about Drupal Commerce.

We will also have the first public viewing of the videos created from footage taken at DrupalCampNW2012. There is one video regarding Drupal for business and one video regarding the Drupal community and the main DrupalCamp event.

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

If you are interested then please sign up at meetup.com.

The February NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 6th at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM. Note that we are still starting at the new time of 7PM.

For the Februrary NWDUG we have Jon Spriggs talking about How The Internet Works. Most of us dabble with network services in the form of HTTP, but most people don’t really understand what all the devices are which sit between your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone and the server at the far end.

This presentation intends to help you understand how your connections get from your device, through your local network, and to it’s destination. He will briefly cover most of the devices and some of the services which help or hinder that connection and explain what they do, and why.

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

If you are interested then please sign up at meetup.com.

The January NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 9th at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM. This is a week later than our normal time due to MadLab being closed over the holiday break. We will also be starting at the new later time of 7PM.

This month we have a talk from Mike Bell about caching in Drupal. This will include internal Drupal cachine, memcache, APC, Varnish, akamai and all that caching can do for your Drupal site.

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

The December NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 5th at MadLab on Edge Street from 6PM until 9PM.

This month we are continuing our theme of back to basics. After looking at installing Drupal, using instillation profiles and modules we are moving onto theming Drupal. This will follow the same format as before where we have a short presentation before breaking off into groups.

We will also be doing a recap of DrupalCampNW, which we have already received some really positive comments about.

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

The November NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 7th at MadLab on Edge Street from 6PM until 9PM.

We are continuing out "Back to basics" sessions and this month we will be looking at creating your own modules. This will follow the usual method of a quick introduction talk followed by breaking off into groups. Yan has volunteered to lead the introduction so be sure to make him feel welcome. We need experienced developers to help people in the session so even if you know about modules please come along and help out.

We usually wrap things up at about 8:30 to 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!