North West Drupal User Group

NWDUG monthly meetup December 2025

Date: 19:00pm 9th December 2025

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This week we have Greg Harvey, talking about ce-deploy. This is an ansible tool that is used to deploy different types of application. He'll be going through the tool and showing a demo of it in action.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup October 2025

Date: 19:00pm 21st October 2025

NOTE! We are holding this a week later than normal due to DrupalCon Europe being 14-17th October :)

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavor to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 11th February 2025

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have a short talk by Greg Harvey from Code Enigma.

The Ansible Wars: A Trilogy. Part 1: Belligerent servers
Installing and configuring software on Debian Linux servers with Ansible using ce-provision, and why it saves you time.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 10th September 2024

It's time for another virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have David Suissa talking about Implementing AI solutions for the French government

As part of its strategic plan for this decade, the French government is pursuing its efforts to provide more and improved public services online.

With the recent emergence of European AI solutions and providers, it has opened the possibility to integrate government managed AI platforms with public services facing sites.

How could AI systems be integrated on public services websites and help government agencies?

What could be some of the challenges?

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 13th August 2024

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 9th July 2024

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 11th June 2024

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 14th May 2024

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 9th April 2024

NWDUG Monthly Meetup March 2024

Date: 19:00pm 12th March 2024

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have David Suissa with his session Install Drupal for local development with DDEV in 5 easy and effortless steps ! 10 minutes TOPS

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup Feb 2024

Date: 19:00pm 13th February 2024

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 9th January 2024

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 10th October 2023

This month we have Lee Walker, who will be talking about "Laravel for Drupal developers. Why we should all add Laravel to our toolkits".

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 12th September 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 12th September 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 8th August 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup August 2023

Date: 19:00pm 8th August 2023

This month, we have lightning talks!

Lightning talks are short 5-10 minute talks and are perfect for trialling a new talk, a whole new topic, or for trying public speaking for the first time.

Topics we've had a previous lightning talk nights are Web Components, Experiences of a Drupal Apprentice, SOLID Principles, how to solve a Rubik's Cube!

Please let us know via meetup if you want to give a talk on the night and we will make sure you get a priority slot.

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.
We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know! We would love to have you speak at future events.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 11th July 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 11th July 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 13th June 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 13th June 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 9th May 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 11th April 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 14th February 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 10th January 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 14th December 2022

This month we will be celebrating the release of Drupal 10.

Our usual "second Tuesday of the month" slot was just 1 day before Drupal 10 is to be released. We therefore decided to move our meetup by a day to coincide with this release. Please be aware of the change of day!

We have no speaker this month, but we will be going through installing Drupal 10 and celebrating this milestone release of our favourite CMS!

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

Next.js + Drupal workshop with Alex Moreno

Date: 19:00pm 2nd November 2022

PLEASE NOTE the change in day. This isn't our usual "2nd Tuesday of the Month" meetup, but a "very specific Wednesday in November". We will be back to our normal schedule in December.

This month we have Alex Moreno who will be giving a tutorial session on creating a headless Drupal site with Next.js.

After an introduction we will be working individually to install a Next.js application. At the end of the process we should all have a working Next.js application, hosted on Pantheon. This application can be downloaded locally and run it wherever you want!

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 11th October 2022

NWDUG monthly meetup

Date: 19:00pm 13th September 2022

NWDUG monthly meetup August 2022

Date: 19:00pm 9th August 2022

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

This month, we have lightning talks!

Lightning talks are short 5-10 minute talks and are perfect for trialling a new talk, a whole new topic, or for trying public speaking for the first time.

Topics we've had a previous lightning talk nights are Web Components, Experiences of a Drupal Apprentice, SOLID Principles, how to solve a Rubik's Cube!

Please let us know via meetup or [@nwdug](https://www.twitter.com/) on Twitter if you want to give a talk on the night and we will make sure you get a priority slot.

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know! We would love to have you speak at future events.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

(The smart way to) Managing Factories of sites at Scale with Alex Moreno

Date: 19:00pm 12th July 2022

In spite of the threats to kill Drupal multisite, it is alive and more popular than ever. Let's learn what Drupal multisite is, what problems it solves, when to use it, and how Pantheon tools could help you push your multisite a step further.

Alejandro is a developer advocate for Pantheon and has worked in different roles, from developer to technical architect. He has been the technical lead on teams of every size, from small to big to ginormous. He has co-founded three different companies with different partners in Technology, Content Management, Marketing Online and Tourism.

About Alex
Alex has been lucky enough to have worked on and led some of the biggest enterprise projects in Drupal like Royal Mail, Parcelforce, BBC, Novartis, Bayer, NationalGrid and many others.

He also worked with one of the biggest consultancies in the world, Capgemini, where he enjoyed the delivery and learning curve of complex tools and architectures in the enterprise world.

He has seen Drupal Multisite projects of every size. Join us to learn his lessons on success, pain points and failures over his years of experience

The Zoom details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

Embedding DrupalPod technology in clients' projects with Ofer Shaal

Date: 19:00pm 14th June 2022

This meeting will be online via Zoom

[Drupalpod.com](https://github.com/shaal/DrupalPod) revolutionized Drupal contributions, enabling anyone to work on a full development environment in the browser with just one click (literally). This session is designed to help you integrate this innovative technology into your projects, which simplifies project onboarding, development, review, and testing.

Learning Objectives:

* Set up development environments easily in the cloud by applying best practices.
* Establish a local/remote development environment that is interchangeable.
* Take advantage of features that are only available through remote development environments.

Ofer Shaal's bio:

At Phase2, I am a Senior Frontend Developer, where

* I create web components for the [Outline design system](https://github.com/phase2/outline).
* I love keeping up with the bleeding edge of technology.
* I am a Drupal core maintainer for [Umami](https://www.drupal.org/docs/umami-drupal-demonstration-installation-profile).
* I co-created [Drupal Rector](https://www.drupal.org/project/rector), which automates Drupal core upgrades.
* I built [DrupalPod.com](https://github.com/shaal/DrupalPod) \- frictionless Drupal development in your browser\.

The Zoom link will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!
We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

The varieties of development experience with Andrew Harmel-Law

Date: 19:00pm 10th May 2022

This meeting will be online via [Zoom](https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89155105022?pwd=TE1URnU2cFl5RkUydCt5SEhBeG1Xdz09)

Let's be honest with ourselves and talk about how it feels to write code. Let's examine how being open about the highs and lows might tell us about what's going on when we write code, why it's so hard (and exhilarating), and how we might get better at it.

Have you ever wondered why it feels like it does to write code? Have you ever stopped and thought “if this is supposed to be such an intellectual exercise, why am I experiencing so many emotions, from the heights of elation to the pits of despair?”

I have.

Since this first occurred to me years ago I’ve pieced together a theory which I believe gives not only an explanation for such mental states, but also offers a new means of evaluating how we work with software, and perhaps even becoming better at it.

In this session I’ll explain the theory, bringing in the latest views from neuro and cognitive science. I’ll then consider how it can be applied, not only explaining how it feels to write code, but also interrogating why each of us has such wildly different experiences. In doing so you’ll gain a far deeper understanding of this daily activity and consequently drive significant personal improvements.

About Andrew Harmel-Law
Andrew is an over-enthusiastic Tech Principal specialising in Java/JVM technologies, agile delivery, build tools and automation, and domain driven design. Experienced across the software development lifecycle and in many sectors including government, banking, and eCommerce, what motivates him is the production of large-scale software solutions, fulfilling complex client requirements. He understands that people, tooling, architecture and process all have key roles to play in achieving this.

Andrew has a passion for open source software and its communities. He has been interested in and involved with OSS to a greater or lesser extent since his career began; as a user, contributor, expert group member, or paid advocate. Andrew enjoys sharing his experience as much as possible. This sharing is not only seen in his formal consulting engagements, but also informally through mentoring, blog posts, conferences (speaking and organising), and open sourcing his code.

The Zoom link will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.
We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!
We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

ECA (Event - Condition - Action): New rules engine for Drupal 9+ w/ Jürgen Haas

Date: 19:00pm 12th April 2022

This meeting will be online via Zoom

Inspired by [BPMN](https://www.bpmn.org/) (Business Process Model and Notation) and a customer's requirement to migrate from Drupal 7 to 9 for sites with extensive use of rules, we investigated possible ways forward and built a proof of concept for a brand-new engine in Drupal 9 to process events based on BPMN models. It turned out to be more than a PoC and turned into a set of modules publicly available on drupal.org, including [ECA: Event - Condition - Action](https://www.drupal.org/project/eca) and [BPMN.iO](https://www.drupal.org/project/bpmn_io). This presentation will demonstrate this in action and explain the architecture behind it.

About the presenter
[Jürgen Haas](https://www.drupal.org/u/jurgenhaas) has been a Drupal enthusiast since version 4.7 and a passionate contributor for modules, documentation, patches, and support in the issue queue. Working full-time on Drupal solutions with a focus on backend development and automation/devops. Founder of the Drupal User Group Lake Constance in 2011 and a regular speaker at meetups and a couple of times on DrupalCon too.

The Zoom link will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

Online NWDUG March 2022: Code with confidence using PHPStan with Peter Fisher

Date: 19:00pm 8th March 2022

With new projects starting on PHP 8 and the increasing use on data types and upgrades that PHP 8 brings, the use of static analysis has become increasingly popular. PHPStan has recently released version 1 which includes stricter checks and a pro version that offers more versitility. For new projects, the use of static analysis is a great tool to keep fresh code clean and conformative, but how can static analysis be used on legacy projects and how can PHPstan increase our confidence when building upon our code bases?

Peter Fisher is a UK based contract PHP developer. He has over 20 years experience writing PHP software for small to enterprise clients.
Peter is also the host of How To Code Well, a YouTube channel that has taught developers a wide variety of programming languages. How To Code Well has a live weekly podcast and Peter is a member of the live coders Twitch team.

We are switching back to using Zoom for our meetings, and the details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

Online NWDUG February 2022: Getting ready for Drupal 10 with Gábor Hojtsy

Date: 19:00pm 8th February 2022

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

This is the year of Drupal 10 with a potential release in June, August or December. In this talk, Gábor will cover what to expect from Drupal 10, how we are getting core ready for it and how can you get your code and sites ready for it too.

Gábor is the Drupal 10 initiative coordinator, Drupal core product manager and initiative coordinator working with and on the open source project itself at Acquia. He is a regular Drupal event speaker and organizer and does communication and social media for various initiatives.

Gábor used to be the Drupal 8 multilingual initiative lead and the former release manager of Drupal 6.

He is also passionate about singing, music and amateur acting, especially when these are all combined. However, he has little time for that alongside my two adorable kids nowadays.

The Google chat/hangout details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG monthly meeup

Date: 19:00pm 11th January 2022

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Google chat/hangout details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

Online NWDUG December 2021: Frederik Wouters on Layout Builder, et al!

Date: 19:00pm 14th December 2021

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

This month, Frederik Wouters will be doing a version of the presentation he did at Drupalcon Europe in October ( https://events.drupal.org/europe2021/sessions/paragraphs-gutenberg-ckeditor-wysiwyg-or-layout-builder-or-all-them ). It will be a lively presentation looking at a variety of user experience topics/issues and probably a demonstration of a few different things including the Dropsolid Rocketship distribution (https://www.drupal.org/project/dropsolid_rocketship).

The Google chat/hangout details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get together are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

NWDUG November 2021: Fabian Bircher on Config Split 2.x & the future of CMI2

Date: 19:00pm 9th November 2021

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

Fabian Bircher is the maintainer of the Config Split module and has agreed to give an updated version of the presentation he did at Drupalcon Europe last month.

Config Split is installed on around 45k sites and has remained fairly stable over the last four years. It is very versatile and covers many use cases. Unfortunately, this versatility has not made it easier to document it and provide a recommended way of using it. In addition, some of the workflows require editing settings.php and using drush in a specific sequence.

So, in the new 2.x branch we introduced many new quality of life improvements and new UI options to manage splits and their config. The functionality of 2.x is still the same as 1.x but using the API added to Drupal 8.8 so there should not be any backwards incompatibility concerns. Some of those new features - like activating and deactivating splits and saving the split as a collection in the sync folder - will serve as a testbed for the simpler and more opinionated Config Environment module that is planned to be added to Drupal core.

Sign up to learn how the new features of Config Split work and how you can use them in your workflows. Help us to get the most used parts of Config Split into core!

The Google chat/hangout details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

We endeavour to have guest speakers for each meeting, so if you have something you'd like to present, please let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. Our virtual get togethers are always warm and welcoming - we hope to see you there.

Online NWDUG September 2021: Ted Bowman on the Automatic Update Module

Date: 19:00pm 14th September 2021

Due to COVID-19, we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead, we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Google chat/hangout details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month, Ted Bowman from Acquia's Drupal Acceleration Team will be demonstrating the Automatic Update Module https://www.drupal.org/project/automatic_updates. This will be very interesting!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG August 2021 - Lightning Talks!

Date: 19:00pm 10th August 2021

Due to COVID-19 we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Google chat/hangout details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have our annual lightning talks! If you have a talk to give on Drupal, web development, project management or anything else that interests you then get in touch and we'll book you in. You don't even need slides, just something to show off.

Please let us know before hand if you want to give a talk so that we can ensure there are no disappointed people on the day.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG July 2021

Date: 19:00pm 13th July 2021

This month we have Adam Bergstein talking about "SimplyTest.me: The Future Built From The Past".

Simplytest.me has now launched a complete rewrite. During this presentation, we will share the history of simplytest.me and the steps taken to revitalize the project. We will highlight how this vision and execution of work has aligned to our values and helps us better achieve our mission. We will review the new architecture of the site and some key improvements made to improve the service. Finally, we will share our first official roadmap where we present our future priorities and quarterly delivery targets.

It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. Bring a beer, a tea, or a non-alcoholic drink of your choice and let's chat about Drupal.

All are welcome! o/

Online NWDUG March 2021

Date: 19:00pm 9th March 2021

We have no planned talks for this month, so let's get together (virtually) and chat about Drupal (or whatever).

Whilst we don't have any set talks, if you want to give a lightning talk then please get in touch! We'd be happy to hear a lightning talk or two during the evening.

It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. Bring a beer, a tea or a non-alcoholic drink of your choice and chat about Drupal. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG February 2021

Date: 19:00pm 9th February 2021

This month's NWDUG meetup will feature Alex Moreno (@morenodotnet) who will be talking about "Visual regression testing made easy".

Here's a synopsis of his session:

----

Building software is complex. Testing for regressions and making sure your application is stable and you can go to production with confidence should not be complex.

There are already tools to facilitate visual regression testing, like behat, wraith, etc… However those tools require (sometimes a lot of) work to setup and maintain, and they won’t give you the complete assurance that ALL pages in your site are working as they were before. In other words, a full big picture.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that would scan all the pages in your site or application, and would flag you if any of them had changed after a deployment (or in your pre production environment)?

Enter GlitcherBot.

---

We will also have the usual news and events.

With another national lock down in the UK it is more important that ever to maintain contact with people. We will still be meeting virtually so please come along and chat about Drupal and (visual regression testing of course!).

Bring a beer, a tea or a non-alcoholic drink of your choice and chat about Drupal. All are welcome. We hope to see you there o/

Online NWDUG January 2021

Date: 19:00pm 12th January 2021

With another national lock down in the UK it is more important that ever to maintain contact with people. So let's get together (virtually) and chat about Drupal (or whatever). We will have the usual news and events roundup but there will be no set talks this month.

Whilst we don't have any set talks, if you want to give a lightning talk then please get in touch! We'd be happy to hear a lightning talk or two during the evening.

It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. Bring a beer, a tea or a non-alcoholic drink of your choice and chat about Drupal. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG December 2020

Date: 19:00pm 22nd December 2020

This month's (delayed) NWDUG will be on the 22 December. As it's quite close to the end of the year we will just be having an informal meetup. It's more of a social meetup, but still virtual.

Whilst we don't have any set talks this month, if you want to give a lightning talk then please get in touch! We'd be happy to hear a lightning talk or two during the evening.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. Bring a beer, a tea or a non-alcoholic drink of your choice and chat about Drupal. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG October 2020

Date: 19:00pm 13th October 2020

Due to COVID-19 we will (again) not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom call details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have Stephen Smith, who will be talking about "The future of Webinars – VR/AR".

"How can we use webinar technology to create a more immersive and engaging experience? In this talk we will examine the world of Virtual and Augmented reality and learn how we can use this technology to bring the virtual world closer to a face to face experience."

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG September 2020

Date: 19:00pm 8th September 2020

Due to COVID-19 we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom call details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have Maciej Lukianski, who will be talking about "Droopler - making Drupal more affordable". This will be a will talk about Droopler in general but also about new features in latest releases and the roadmap.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG August 2020

Date: 19:00pm 11th August 2020

Due to COVID-19 we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom call details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have our annual lightning talks! If you have a talk to give on Drupal, web development, project management or anything else that interests you then get in touch and we'll book you in. You don't even need slides, just something to show off.

Please let us know before hand if you want to give a talk so that we can ensure there are no disappointed people on the day.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG July 2020

Date: 19:00pm 14th July 2020

Due to COVID-19 we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom call details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have a couple of shorter talks:
- Async and Await by Michael Trestianu
- Curl by Phil Norton

If you want to give a lightning talk this month then we should have time to fit you in. Get in touch and let us know!

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together to break the monotony of isolation during this crisis so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG June 2020

Date: 19:00pm 9th June 2020

Due to COVID-19 we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom call details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have Richard Sheppard talking about DDEV.

Richard will be demonstrating DDEV (https://github.com/drud/ddev) from initial setup (including a bit of background regarding Docker and containers), some more interesting commands, idiosyncrasies between Linux and Macs, and various interesting recipes.

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together to break the monotony of isolation during this crisis so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

Online NWDUG May 2020

Date: 19:00pm 12th May 2020

Due to COVID-19 we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom call details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have Oliver Davies with TDD (Test Driven Drupal).

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together to break the monotony of isolation during this crisis so we hope to see you there. All are welcome.

NWDUG April 2020

Date: 19:00pm 14th April 2020

Due to COVID-19 we will not be holding a face to face meeting this month. Instead we will be having a virtual NWDUG!

The Zoom call details will be available to anyone who RSVPs to the event.

This month we have Rakesh James with Reporting API and HTTP Structured Header.

"The Reporting API is a mechanism for web servers to tell browsers where to send errors and other information about a browsing session.

When a web application encounters some error or potential problem it is important that the application author has some mechanism to be made aware of that error. Common errors such as unhandled JavaScript exceptions can be observed in the script. But other errors may occur when it's not possible to rely on a running script (such as a browser crash, or a Content Security Policy violation that prevents the page from being loaded). The Reporting API provides a generic mechanism for a browser to report errors back to an HTTP Server in an out-of-band fashion.

Using the Reporting API it is possible to get Drupal to record errors on your website's client-side."

We will also have the usual news and events roundup. It will be nice to have a virtual get together to break the monotony of isolation during this crisis so we hope to see you there.

NWDUG February 2020

Date: 19:00pm 11th February 2020

This month we have Phil Wolstenholme talking about "Contrib safari: a tour of lesser-known but useful contrib modules".

"I've been working on an install profile for CTI projects and found quite a lot of cool modules as a result, and I was thinking I could go through our Composer file and talk about some of the interesting modules that I've included in the profile and what we use them for."

Along with the usual news and events.

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue.

NWDUG January 2020

Date: 19:00pm 14th January 2020

This month we have David Thorne talking about Avoiding Burnout and Imposter Syndrome.

"This talk aims to demonstrate how I as a developer came back from severe burnout, caused by a combination of imposter syndrome, depression and other health issues to rebuild myself as a developer and a person. In the process I also learned to love Drupal and to a degree myself again."

Along with the usual news and events.

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue.

NWDUG November 2019

Date: 19:00pm 12th November 2019

This month we have Mike Lehan talking about Exposing AWS with flAWS.

"As more web applications move to cloud hosting, the security landscape is changing. Whilst network & server level attacks should be mitigated (to some degree) in cloud environments, the complexity of these systems and the ease of which they can be used leads to a new scope for attacks on misunderstood, and thus, misconfigured cloud resources.

This talk will give examples of what to look for when securing or testing AWS setups, guided by flAWS, an online playground for exploiting vulnerabilities with AWS in a safe environment. The talk does not require knowledge of AWS, and the resource is free online for those who want to continue learning afterwards."

We will still have the usual news and events.

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue.

NWDUG Unconference 2019

Date: 9:00am 12th October 2019

It's time again for the NWDUG Unconference and we thought it would be a good idea to post the information about the event here to make everyone on our meetup group aware.

Tickets are on sale at https://ti.to/nwdug/2019-unconference!

Where is the unconference?
The unconference will be held at Federation House in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

Federation House
Manchester
M4 4BF

When is the unconference?
12th October 2018, 9am - 5pm

The unconference doesn’t end there! Once the scheduled proceedings are wrapped up, we will decamp to a nearby venue to eat, drink and be merry; some of the most important discussions take place during this part of the day.

What Is An Unconference?
An unconference is the opposite of a conference. Where a conference has a schedule of talks planned in advance, an unconference starts with no agenda until the attendees, not the organisers, determine one.

Everyone is encouraged to bring a talk to the event, with the day having 30 minute slots including time for questions, and time for people to change rooms ready for the next talk to begin.

The focus of the unconference is the Drupal Content Management Framework and supporting subjects including databases, frameworks, security, UX, front-end development and design are also encouraged. Last year's topics ranged from front end issues such as Design Patterns, Performance Tuning with Lighthouse, and SASS, decoupled topics like JSON API and Gatsby, Decoupled Drupal & Gatsby, and Security and AWS. We also witnessed the live fix of a core issue by core committers, and a live accessibility audit. Community topics such as the Drupal Apprenticeship Scheme.

Talks debuted in previous years at the unconference have subsequently been featured at events such Drupal Mountain Camp, Frontend United and Drupal Developer Days.

Find Out More
For more information about the event and the NWDUG group please see the NWDUG Unconference 2019 website at https://uncon.nwdrupal.org.uk/.

Get In Touch
There are a few ways to get in touch with us.

nwdrupal@gmail.com
twitter.com/nwdug
NWDUG Meetup

Social
To be announced later.

Buy Tickets
https://ti.to/nwdug/2019-unconference

NOTE: if you sign up through this meetup group you will not be counted. Only tickets bought through our official ticket seller will count.

NWDUG September 2019

Date: 19:00pm 10th September 2019

This month we don't currently have a scheduled talk. We will still have the usual news and events and can then break off into discussions or problem solving afterwards.

If you have a talk you want to give (or something you want to talk about) then please let us know and we'll book you in.

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue. You do not have to commit to talk in advance.

NWDUG August 2019

Date: 19:00pm 13th August 2019

This month we have Lightning Talks!

Anyone can talk this month, on any topic they choose! Lightning Talks are short 5-10 minute talks and are perfect for trialling a new talk, a whole new topic, or for trying public speaking for the first time.

Topics we've had a previous lightning talk nights range from Web Components, Experiences of a Drupal Apprentice, SOLID Principles, to Living in a Van and how it applies to dev!

This is the easiest way to get yourself an awesome NWDUG pin badge, and a great time to trial an idea for our Unconference in October.

Plus all the usual Drupal news and events round-up!

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue. You do not have to commit to talk in advance.

NWDUG July 2019

Date: 19:00pm 9th July 2019

This month we have our own Eli re-presenting Gábor Hojtsy's State of Drupal 9 talk from Drupal Dev Days:

Drupal 9 is planned to be released June 3, 2020, in a little less than a year! Also, Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 both go unsupported by November 2021. This session covers the timeline getting there as well as where are we and what kind of changes can you expect. It will be most valuable for developers but businesses can also get a summary on status details and tools to help with the transition.

Plus all the usual Drupal news and events round-up!

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue.

NWDUG June 2019

Date: 19:00pm 11th June 2019

This month we have the awesome Phil Wolstenholme talking about "Rebuilding a UK university website with Pattern Lab, Vue.js, Tailwind CSS, and a new Drupal 8 base theme to tie it all together"

And in a late announced addition, Philip Norton will be talking on Drupal 8's language cascade!

Plus all the usual Drupal news and events round-up!

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue.

NWDUG April 2019

Date: 19:00pm 9th April 2019

This month we have Michael Trestianu talking about Decoupled Drupal and Gatsby.

Also from Brian Teeman: "Anything you can do I can do better 😉"
You've all told me so much about your work building Umami to create an awesome out of the box experience for Drupal I thought I would have a go at building J-umami

Plus all the usual Drupal news and events round-up!

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list beforehand for the venue.

NWDUG February 2019

Date: 19:00pm 12th February 2019

This month, we have two talks

No Monkey Business Static Progressive Web Apps: By Eli Ward and Dominic Fallows

Or, How Interactive Investor uses decoupled Drupal, GatsbyJS, ReactJS and AWS to deliver rich content without making Google cry

In 2018, Interactive Investor updated from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. Rather than undertake a like for like upgrade, ii took advantage of Drupal 8's core decoupled capabilities to re-architect the whole stack. Leveraging some of the latest best-in-breed technologies to deliver a Static Progressive Web Application that delivers news, analysis, and time critical market data concerning tens of thousands of financial instruments from multiple sources. Maintaining an SEO valuable web app with a page delivery time, across all device types, that is competitive for search ranking.

Please register for this event in advance - we need to supply an attendee list 48 hours beforehand for this venue.

NWDUG Unconference 2018

Date: 9:00am 3rd November 2018

It's time again for the NWDUG Unconference and we thought it would be a good idea to post the information about the event here to make everyone on our meetup group aware. To buy a ticket please go to https://ti.to/nwdug/2018-unconference/

Where is the unconference?
The unconference will be held at Federation House in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.

Federation House
Manchester
M4 4BF

When is the unconference?
3th November 2018, 9am - 5pm

The unconference doesn’t end there! Once the scheduled proceedings are wrapped up, we will decamp to a Roxy Ballroom to eat, drink and be merry; some of the most important discussions take place during this part of the day.

What Is An Unconference?
An unconference is the opposite of a conference. Where a conference has a schedule of talks planned in advance, an unconference starts with no agenda until the attendees, not the organisers, determine one.

Everyone is encouraged to bring a talk to the event, with the day having 30 minute slots including time for questions, and time for people to change rooms ready for the next talk to begin.

The focus of the unconference is the Drupal Content Management Framework. Supporting subjects including databases, frameworks, security, UX, front-end development and design are also encouraged. The format of the session is up to you, but you can give a presentation, run a Q&A or even hold a pannel discussion. Last year’s topics ranged from practical talks on debugging and code reviews, demonstrations of new contributed Drupal modules, genetic algorithms, the history of encryption and off line capable websites incorporating service workers.

Talks debuted at the 2016 unconference went on to be featured at events such Drupal Mountain Camp in Switzerland and Frontend United in Greece.

Talks debuted at the 2017 unconference went on to be featured at events such as Drupal Developer Days in Seville and Frontend United in Athens.

Find Out More
For more information about the event and the NWDUG group please see the NWDUG Unconference 2018 website at https://uncon.nwdrupal.org.uk/.

Get In Touch
There are a few ways to get in touch with us.

nwdrupal@gmail.com
twitter.com/nwdug
NWDUG Meetup

Social
The social event will held at Roxy Ballroom, where we have booked a private room from 5:30pm until 10:30pm. People will be able to buy food and drinks and we will also have a dedicated area for games like pingpong. We will be asking if you want to attend the social when you get a ticket so that we can get an idea of numbers.

Buy Tickets
To buy a ticket please visit https://ti.to/nwdug/2018-unconference/
NOTE: if you sign up through this meetup group you will not be counted. Only tickets bought through ti.to will count.

Distributed Drupal Sprint - UK

Date: 10:00am 22nd September 2018

Join us for the first Distributed Drupal Sprint in UK. This is a Drupal All-day Sprint where communities from UK contribute as one. NWDUG are meeting at CTI in Manchester, whilst sprints are also being held in London and Bristol.

By joining us you will have the opportunity to gain knowledge from your peers, whilst sharing your own knowledge, allowing everyone to help the thousands of people who will benefit from your contribution.

Sessions will be run on Saturday morning to help new contributors understand how to collaborate with each project and set up all the tools needed to contribute.

Everyone is welcome! We will split into groups and work on Drupal issues, core and contrib. Don't forget to bring your laptop!

For new folks: you can get a head start also by making an account on Drupal.org and getting some contribution tools.
Developers can install git before coming and git clone Drupal 8 core.

We look forward to seeing you!

NWDUG August 2018

Date: 19:00pm 14th August 2018

This month we're switching from our usual long form talks to invite lightning talks from any member who'd like to participate.

Lightning talks are around 5-10 minutes long and can be on any topic in which you think you can interest the group. We will get through as many as we can on the night. If anyone does not get time to present their talk we will invite them to present it at a subsequent meetup.

You don't need to let us know in advance if you would like to talk, but priority will be given to those who do.

Plus all our usual Drupal news round up.

NWDUG June 2018

Date: 19:00pm 12th June 2018

This month we're particularly excited to have not one but two amazing core contributors visiting Manchester to talk to us!

Sally Young, Drupal's Core JavaScript Maintainer & Modernisation Initiative Lead (Slytherin) is coming to talk all things on the JS Initiative.

Also, the real Daniel Wehner (Ravenclaw), the most prolific contributor to Drupal 8 according to http://drupalcores.com, is going to preview his Dev Days talk "Data Visualisation - there's more behind your data" as well!

Plus all our usual Drupal news round up.

North West Drupal Sprint

Date: 9:30am 12th May 2018

We’re holding a Drupal Sprint in the Northern Quarter of Manchester at 31 Dale Street on the 12th May 2018.

The sprint will give you an opportunity to meet other local developers and grow your skills, whilst contributing to making Drupal bigger and better than ever before.

What is a sprint?
A sprint is a group of individuals gathering together to contribute to a specific cause. In this case, as contributors to the Drupal community, we’re inviting individuals to work on all things open source for Drupal. This not only includes coding for modules but also improving user experience and marketing materials, and enriching the content for individual projects.

Where and when?
12th May 9am-4pm
5th Floor, 31 Dale Street, Manchester, M1 1EY
Google Maps Directions - https://goo.gl/maps/az3RDRGHYTQ2
The venue is at the CTI Office meaning we will have free wifi, coffee, and plenty of space available. Pizza will also be provided by one of the organisers.
The building is unfortunately not wheelchair accessible but a lift is available from the ground floor up a few steps.

Who can go?
Everyone involved with Drupal! Sprinting is not limited to just writing code. Content writers, marketing, documentation, illustration, user experience, designers, photographers and even recipe writers (yes really!); all types of contributions are truly welcome. We will help you find meaningful ways to start or continue your contribution no matter your skill set.

All ability levels are welcome at this sprint. Mentors will be available to help beginners take their first steps into contributing to Drupal. So please come along no matter your experience level as there is no better way to learn, than to do!

After the sprint there will also be the opportunity to go for a drink to socialise and get to know your new friends away from a computer screen.

Who’s already going?
A few familiar faces will be at the sprint, including Phil Norton, Rakesh James, Vijay Chandran Mani and Rachel Lawson. But please come along even if you haven’t met anyone before. This event is all about building the North West Drupal community.

More details for the big day
If you’re new to Drupal we’ll have mentors available to help you get set up on the day. All you need to bring along is a laptop and charger and yourself!
Finally you can keep an eye on the issue tag we’ll be adding to closer to the big day - nwdug_may18

See you on the 12th!
Any further questions please contact Rakesh James.

Thanks to Boris Baldinger for the use of his picture (https://www.flickr.com/photos/borisbaldinger/15409563015).

NWDUG August 2017

Date: 19:00pm 8th August 2017

Lightning talks!

This month we're switching from our usual long form talks to invite lightning talks from any member who'd like to participate.

Lightning talks are around 5 minutes long and can be on any topic in which you think you can interest the group. We will get through as many as we can, and if anyone does not get time to present their talk we will invite them to present it at a subsequent meetup.

You don't need to let us know in advance if you would like to talk, but priority will be given to those who do.

NWDUG June 2017

Date: 19:00pm 13th June 2017

This month we have:

Martin Quested will be talking about Breaking Down Forms. This is a talk about a module that Martin has created that pulls in forms from different parts of Drupal. An example of this is to simplify the installation process and some of the more complex admin screens in Drupal so that users with little training can setup Drupal sites.

We will also have Michael Chadwick talking about Drupal 8 frontend using VueJS.

Plus the usual Drupal news and event round up.

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup February 2017

Date: 19:00pm 14th February 2017

Block management in Drupal 8: Andrew MacPherson

We'll take a look at block visibility conditions, writing a condition plugins, and a look at the state of the D8 port of Context module, with the awesome Andrew MacPherson, aka https://twitter.com/martianwebdev.

AWS: Demystifying the Cloud of Acronyms

PHP supremo, diversity champion and ElePHPant peddlar Mark Baker (https://twitter.com/Mark_Baker) is also coming to demystify AWS for us.

Working in Web Development, we speak a language of jargon and acronyms; but take a look at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and even the most hardened Jargonista or Acronymite might quail at the plethora of obscurity and abbreviation that Amazon wrap around their cloud services. Looking at the control panel is a maze of arcane vernacular, and wading through the documentation can be as daunting as deciphering ancient alchemic journals.

So let's have a go at demystifying the cloud of acronyms, and look at how Innoved Learning provide a high-availability, resilient SaaS (Software as a Service) platform using AWS services.

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup January 2017

Date: 19:00pm 10th January 2017

This month we have Paul Waring, talking about Configuration Management with Ansible and Git.

Paul Waring is a freelance IT consultant based in Greater Manchester, with experience in web design, hosting and programming in a professional capacity since 2000. Outside of work, Paul runs Currybeer socials and Geek Walks. He is also a regular attendee at ManLUG and has given talks on a variety of subjects.

Ansible is a tool for managing the configuration and provisioning of Linux desktops, servers, and virtual machines. With minimal client requirements (SSH and Python) it’s easy to rollout to both existing infrastructure and new machines. You can use Ansible to manage not only core configuration such as networking. but also individual services and databases.

This talk will show you how to get Ansible up and running and use it to manage a basic Linux server with a collection of services (mail, web and a firewall). We’ll explore the pros and cons of Ansible and why you might choose it over other configuration management options. Finally, we’ll see how to combine Ansible with Git to automate the process, providing rollback support and making sure you never forget to deploy a change.

We'll have all the usual Drupal news, event round-up, and networking.

NWDUG & PHPNW Joint Christmas Meetup

Date: 19:00pm 13th December 2016

He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty programmer!

We've all been there at some point or another, a client walks into the room and demands... a shrubbery. And while nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition you can be sure that we will spend this talk taking a look at situations that will arise during your project life-cycle and find humorous ways to deal with them through the magic that is Python. And we don't mean the programming language!

We talk about how project managers will keep insisting that the parrot is still alive, why "Romanes eunt domus" is not the best name for a variable and that the Ministry of Silly (array) Walks should be founded ASAP. This is a humorous dig at the development life-cycle and shows how sometimes we can take things a bit too seriously. We should enjoy our jobs a lot more and how to manage our reactions when presented with some of the more frustrating parts of the job.

With a tongue firmly in cheek and lots of clips from the best of Python we will end the session looking on the bright side of life.

This talk was originally written by Matt Cockayne, who has generously given us permission to re-present it as a NWDUG/PHPNW collaboration.

Afterwards, we'll all skip down to 57 Thomas St for some festive drinks and chat. See you there!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup November 2016

Date: 19:00pm 8th November 2016

How to have ideas and talk about them

Ruth Hartnoll gives practical advice on how to find ideas for talks and get your audience interested. Find the germ of an idea, nurture it and watch it grow in this presentation/workshop. Your ideas are valuable and people need to hear them. Ruth will show you how to make this a reality in one nifty evening.

Ruth Hartnoll is the Content Manager at Access; selling ideas is what she does best. She’s been whipping words into shape for the past three and a half years and you can find her work in print and digital with the occasional stage performance as well. She has just begun doing talks and is open to invites - she’s not half as scary as she looks, just ask! You can find Ruth @ruthhartnoll (https://twitter.com/ruthhartnoll) and www.ruththewriter.co.uk (http://ruththewriter.co.uk/)

Plus all the usual Drupal news, event round-up, and networking.

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup October 2016

Date: 19:00pm 11th October 2016

Elliot Ward - Migrate in Drupal 8.1.x

Migration has changed from 8.0.x, so in this talk we'll look at how to use Migrate and supporting modules to migrate data from external sources in to Drupal. On the way we'll look at and demystify some new Drupal 8 features like Event Subscribers and Service Injection that will help us along the way!

John O'Rourke - Fast B2B e-commerce using feeds and rules

John will take an express tour through the process of going from not knowing Drupal, to realising the power it has, to having a working e-commerce site integrated with an in-house system using as little custom code as possible, effectively learning how to use Drupal for rapid prototyping of complex sites. The important components covered are ECK, Feeds, Commerce, Rules and Views. This talk is a work in progress aimed at people who don't know Drupal, so feedback, suggestions, and beer are all welcome afterwards.

Plus all the usual Drupal news, event round-up, and networking.

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup August 2016

Date: 19:00pm 9th August 2016

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup July 2016

Date: 19:00pm 12th July 2016

Mike Bell - Practical REST in Drupal 8

Sure Drupal 8 supports REST but do you know how to use it?

In this talk I’ll cover:

Practical examples of using REST in Drupal 8 to do cool things.Securing your application using oAuth.Using Views to provide custom data output.Preparing you mentally for working with REST and permissions.

Dan Bohea - Automated Mac setup with Ansible

So you've got a brand new system (or just wiped your completely garbled one), wouldn't it be great if you could automate the journey from bare OS to a working development environment including all of your go-to apps and configured just how you like?

I've spent a good while looking to do exactly this with Ansible and the 2 Macs I use for work (I'm a freelance Drupal dev). This session will cover how far I've got, what I've discovered along the way and where I'd like to see this kind of thing go next.

While the session content will be predominantly Mac orientated, the broader subject applies to other operating systems where it is still technically possible (I aim to touch on this).

This session may be of interest to:

- Anyone interested in Ansible.
- Businesses seeking to automate provisioning of local dev systems.
- Developers that care about being able to both document and reproduce their dev environment in detail.

To be 100% clear, this session is not about local development with virtual machines!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup June 2016

Date: 19:00pm 14th June 2016

Improving Website Security with HTTP Headers by Richard Moore

Frameworks like Drupal offer some significant security benefits out of the box - well tested code, ORMs and authentication systems but there are things they don't do for you. Something as simple as adding a single HTTP header can offer significant benefits. This talk will discuss some easy ways to harden your website that will complement the built in protections.

Adding a touch of class to Drupal 7 by Keith Crooks

The release of Drupal 8 has brought Drupal development up to date with more modern Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) techniques. But it’s possible to incorporate these into your Drupal 7 development with the help of a few handy Contributed modules. This talk will give you a brief overview of some of these modules together with some examples of how you can utilise them in your projects to keep procedural code to a minimum.

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup May 2016

Date: 19:00pm 10th May 2016

Building Accessibile Websites - Andrew Macpherson

In February's NWDUG talk we heard about Sunil Peck's experiences of using the internet as a blind person.
Following on from this, we'll take a look at some simple approaches which we can use to make our websites more accessible. We'll look at some common pitfalls, learn how they can be avoided, and hopefully bust a few myths along the way. The aim is to help designers and developers get started on the road to building more accessibility into daily practice.
- How the use of colour affects web accessibility.
- The keyboard-only experience, and the importance of focus styles.
- Discover how the use (or mis-use) of CSS and Javascript can help accessibility - or hinder it.
- Learn about various ways of interacting with a web page using a screen-reader.
- Find out what "semantic" HTML really means, and why it's at the core of the accessible experience.

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup April 2016

Date: 19:00pm 12th April 2016

Greg Harvey (Code Enigma) & Michael Trestianu (Access Digital)

Michael Trestianu - Being Lazy with Drupal

You have a slight panic attack when…... a client provides you with a complex matrix spreadsheet and asks you to incorporate it’s logic into their Drupal site to generate PDF certificates, furthermore out of the 200+ conditions, they want to be able to update its logic and feedback items! The only way around such a problem is to be lazy and keep things simple. This talk will describe and explain my approach into coming up with a solution to such a problem.

Greg Harvey - Getting Started with Jenkins

You might think CI is something you like the sound of, but who has time to get into that? Well it's much easier than you realise. In this talk I show you how to get going with one particular CI tool - Jenkins. We'll look at a set of common use cases and explain how to start small and iteratively build up some really useful devops tools as you work. It's nowhere near as hard as you might think!

Plus all the usual news and off piste chat afterwards!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup March 2016

Date: 19:00pm 8th March 2016

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

This month we have Claire Gowler, who will be talking about mental health at work.

"Awareness of mental health issues in the industry and general public is growing slowly, however this is only the first step on the journey. What we need to do now is define processes and practices so that both employees and businesses can help sufferers in their working lives.

This talk will give practical advice on how to talk to your employer about mental illness, and some tips about what help your employer can provide. This will cover things such as how to be agile with mental illness, initiatives such as Mindful Employer and mental health first aid and how to be comfortable within yourself at work."

If you have a lightning talk you want to give, or just something cool that you've done, then feel free to come along and share it with the group.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup February 2016

Date: 19:00pm 9th February 2016

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

This month we have Sunil Peck, who will be talking about using the internet as a blind person.

"I have been blind all my life and began using the internet in 1998. It's been a liberation to me. It means I can read newspapers independently, shop on my own and consume content from TV and radio stations around the world. The wealth of information in press cuttings libraries and in online archives I have been able to access has also enabled me to work as a BBC researcher and reporter and as a press officer for the British Red Cross.

The software I use is known as screenreading software. Once installed on a Windows or Apple device, It enables me to locate and activate links, select options from popup menus and listen to text bing spoken aloud.

Some websites can be tricky to use because of the amount of content they contain. But thanks to advancements in screenreading technology and web designers taking the needs of blind users into account, it is rare to come across a website which I can't use.

I hope my talk will convey a sense of what makes a good website from the point of view of a blind user."

After the main talk we have Emma Karayiannis, who will be giving a talk called Contribution: Getting started and coming back for more.

"Figuring out how to contribute successfully to Drupal can be tough. You need to learn how the processes work, manage communication, figure out where you fit into the Drupal project, as well as produce the work that you would like to contribute.

This talk will explain how contribution works, how to start at a nice manageable level and when you are feeling confident (and completely hooked), how to build up your skills to become a fully fledged contributor to Drupal."

We may have time for any lightning talks at the end of the talks, but be aware that we might run out of time. We usually wrap things up before 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

Drupal Global Sprint Weekend, Manchester

Date: 10:00am 30th January 2016

So the Drupal Global Sprint Weekend is being held on 30th and 31st of January.

See more information about the event here: https://groups.drupal.org/node/488988

Currently, there are no plans to do anything with this in Manchester, but you can change it by stating your interest. If we get enough people on board we will look into venues (even if it's just around a kitchen table) and sponsorship of drinks and pizza.

RSVP now and let us know you are interested! Let's get Manchester on the Drupal Sprint map! :)

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup January 2016

Date: 19:00pm 12th January 2016

The January NWDUG meetup will take place on 12th January at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM. Note that this is the second Tuesday of January and this will be the normal meetup day from now on.

We are no longer meeting on the first Wednesday of the month. The new meetup day is the second Tuesday of the month.

This month we have Eli Ward, who will be talking about Drupal 8 Migrations.

After the main talk we will be opening up the floor to anyone who wants to give a short talk on a subject of their choosing. Due to the recent release of Drupal 8 we are encouraging people to talk about how to do things in Drupal 8.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup December 2015

Date: 19:00pm 2nd December 2015

This month we have Andrew Larcombe talking about Impact Mapping.

Andrew Larcombe is currently an independent Software Delivery Consultant and is a regular speaker at Drupal events including DrupalCon Prague and DrupalCamp London.

Impact mapping is a strategic planning technique. It prevents organisations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects, by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better roadmap decisions.

See more at www.impactmapping.org/about.php

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup November 2015

Date: 19:00pm 4th November 2015

The November 2015 NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 4th at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This meeting will feature a number of different talks.

- Clair Shaw will be giving a lightning talk called "There’s more to Code Reviews than you might think".

- We are also hoping to have Crispin Read give a remote session (if everything works out) on the Drupal Apprenticeship Scheme.

If you have a lightning talk you want to give, or just something cool that you've done, then feel free to come along and share it with the group.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup October 2015

Date: 19:00pm 7th October 2015

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

Due to the success of the lightning talks in August we have decided to put on another night of lightning talks for the October meetup. Members of the group are encouraged to come along and give lightning or elevator pitch talks to the group. These are small talks that last up to 10 minutes long or can be run in the Pecha Kucha format with 20 slides in 6 minutes (1 slide every 20 seconds).

There are no set speakers for the night, but if you fancy giving a talk then please let us know by leaving a comment on the meetup event page so that we can plan out the night.

This is a great opportunity to get started in the world of conference speaking in a friendly and encouraging atmosphere. Although this is a crowd of Drupal people the talks don't have to be about Drupal so you can talk on anything you want for 5-10 minutes. You don't even need any slides!

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup September 2015

Date: 19:00pm 2nd September 2015

This months NWDUG meetup will be a meeting to discuss the group itself. NWDUG has been going since October 2007 and has had almost continuous monthly meetups since then. The group has also been responsible for organising three Drupal Camps and lots of Drupal code sprints where members of the group have contributed to Drupal. The time has come to talk about the group, about how the group is organised and about future plans for the group.

The loose agenda for the meeting will be as follows:

- Current state of group
- Current group assets
- What do people want from the group
- Volunteers
- Setting up a committee
- Setting the group up as a CIC
- Group Manifesto

As this will be a discussion group with little (or no) Drupal content we will be putting on some food and drinks for the meeting, which will be funded by kind donations from CTI and Access. We will be ordering food before the event as so you must be RSPV'd to the meetup group event in order to guarantee something to eat. You are welcome to turn up on the night, but don't expect to get food without first letting us know you will be attending!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup August 2015

Date: 19:00pm 5th August 2015

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

This month we invite members of the group to give a series of short lightning talks or elevator pitches. These are small talks that last up to 10 minutes long or can be run in the Pecha Kucha format with 20 slides in 6 minutes (1 slide every 20 seconds). We have no set speakers so it is up to members of the group to step up on the night and give a little talk. This is a great opportunity to get started in the world of conference speaking in a friendly and encouraging atmosphere. Although this is a crowd of Drupal people the talks don't have to be about Drupal so you can talk on anything you want for 5-10 minutes.

We usually wrap things up before 9:00 PM and move to a pub, although this will largely depend on how many talks we have.

Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup July 2015

Date: 19:00pm 1st July 2015

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

This month we have Mike Bell who will be talking about the Mental Health and Open Source.

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Mental Health is a subject that touches every single one of us within the community. It's something that people find incredibly difficult to talk about and yet it's so important.

It uses my own experience with family, friends and colleagues to paint a picture of what depression and anxiety are and how it effects our work and behaviour. I also discuss my relationship with impostor syndrome and how my attitude towards development has changed.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup June 2015

Date: 19:00pm 3rd June 2015

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

This month we have John Cleary who will be talking about the Capistrano.
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Capistrano : Automate All The Things

For many years Capistrano has been the defacto deployment tool, but many organisations have yet to realise the benefits of automating their deployment process. Automated Deployments are fast, less error prone, easier to rollback and you can dish out the keys to other team members so anyone can deploy.

During this talk we’ll look at how to “capify” a simple PHP project and deploy it in a few minutes. And, as Capistrano is a “remote server automation and deployment tool”, we’ll also look at some of the other things Capistrano can do for you such as restarting apache or grepping server log (and more). We’ll also take a look at the various plug-ins available and see how easy it can be to write your own.

If you are deploying using ssh / git pull / apache restart? Then it’s time to make a change: automate all the things and live in a world of “repeatable success”.
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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup May 2015

Date: 19:00pm 6th May 2015

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

This month we have Maurice Tomkinson who will be talking about the Securing a Drupal site.

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Maurice will lead a discussion on securing a Drupal site, using his own public and private sites as a case study. Maurice is running Drupal 7 on an Ubuntu system with Apache and MySQL. A particular challenge he faces is that the users accessing the secure site are starting from a very low base of computer literacy and security awareness.
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We usually wrap things up before 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup April 2015

Date: 19:00pm 1st April 2015

The April 2015 NWDUG meetup will take place on 1st April at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Ashley Johnson who will be talking about (FR)AGILE.

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Exploring the world of fixed price projects and agile delivery (whilst debunking some myths along the way).
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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup March 2015

Date: 19:00pm 4th March 2015

The March NWDUG meetup will take place on 4th March at New Federation House (Dantzic Street entrance) from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Phil Norton who will be talking about the Drupal Performance.

This talk will look at what can be done to improve the speed of a Drupal site, including profiling and benchmarking a site. The talk will also include a case study about the Drupal based BAFTA website and the recent Film and TV awards, which saw a large amount of traffic in a short amount of time.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup February 2015

Date: 19:00pm 4th February 2015

The February NWDUG meetup will take place on 4th February at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

We have no set talk for this week, but the room is booked so come along and feel free to chat about Drupal. There will be Drupal experts on hand to answer questions and discuss topics to anyone in the group. Things usually wrap up at about 9pm before moving to the nearest pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup January 2015

Date: 19:00pm 7th January 2015

The January NWDUG meetup will take place on 7th January 2015 at New Federation House on Dantzic Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Adam Thomason who will be talking about the Headless Drupal with REST Services.

This will be a talk on how to expose Drupal data for use by other webapps utilising Phonegap and AngularJS.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup December 2014

Date: 19:00pm 3rd December 2014

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

This month we have Andrew Macpherson who will be talking about the Building a website in Drupal 8 - Lessons from annertech.com.

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This is a bunch of small demos gotchas and talking points on how to go about building a Drupal 8 site. The talk is quite informal and will be driven by what the audience is most interested in.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup November 2014

Date: 19:00pm 5th November 2014

The November NWDUG meetup will take place on 5th November at New Federation House on Dantzic Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Adam Thomason who will be talking about the Automated deployment and testing with Wraith.
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Wraith (https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith) is a screenshot comparison tool, written by developers at BBC News, that shows the difference in changes that are made to front end code. The talk will encapsulate how to set up Wraith locally and remotely on a deployment environment (using Jenkins) and how to configure your build to pass/fail based on a Wraith result.
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We usually wrap things up before 9:00 PM and move to a pub. Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup September 2014

Date: 19:00pm 3rd September 2014

The September NWDUG meetup will take place on 3rd September at New Federation House, Dantzic Street, M60 0AF from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Lorna Mitchell who will be talking about the OOP for Drupal Developers.
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A practical, no-rhetoric session on what objects are and why they might be useful to developers. We'll start with a little theory and then move on quickly to some practical examples of what you'll see in an OOP PHP project. From classes, objects and inheritance, we'll move on to file structure and autoloading code in PHP.

This session will also cover more advanced concepts such as traits and interfaces, and discuss how they allow us to build more powerful, flexible applications with less code to maintain. Developers who attend this session will be able to tackle their next OOP project with confidence.
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After the talk we normally break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup August 2014

Date: 19:00pm 6th August 2014

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

This month we invite members of the group to give a series of short lightning talks. These are small talks that last up to 10 minutes long or can be run in the Pecha Kucha format with 20 slides in 6 minutes (1 slide every 20 seconds). We have no set speakers so it is up to members of the group to step up on the night and give a little talk.

This is a great opportunity to get started in the world of conference speaking in a friendly and encouraging atmosphere. Although this is a crowd of Drupal people the talks don't have to be about Drupal so you can talk on anything you want for 5-10 minutes.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup July 2014

Date: 19:00pm 2nd July 2014

The July NWDUG meetup will take place on 2nd July at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Adam Evans who will be talking about the Using Fastly CDN To Turbo Charge Your Drupal Site.
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High traffic web sites often use content delivery networks to provide edge caching, removing load from your own servers and relying on 3rd party providers to distribute your content using there extensive network infrastructure.

Using a CDN with Drupal to serve both content and static assets is hard due to traditional CDN's not supporting things such as HTTP Form posts, and varying on cookies.

Fastly is a CDN provider that allows you to overcome the common issues using a CDN with Drupal and has the perfect architectural fit allowing you to serve your site to a massive world wide audience making use of their edge locations to provide a better user experience.

This presentation will aim to show the basics of architecting your site to work with Fastly and the why and how.
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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup June

Date: 19:00pm 4th June 2014

The June NWDUG meetup will take place on 4th June at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Jeremy Coates who will be talking about Testing with Codeception.
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We've probably all heard by now about Unit Testing, we may even have integrated Test Driven Development into our working practice. Less commonly known though are Functional and Integration Testing practices. Until now, at least in the PHP world, these have been quite hard to achieve. In this talk Jeremy Coates (@phpcodemonkey) will introduce these concepts and a tool chain to enable easy adoption.

Jeremy's Bio: For my day job, I am Managing Director of Magma Digital Ltd, a 22 strong team focussing on delivering business critical software development, using PHP, to enterprise.I am also the driving force behind the UK's PHPNW conference, user group and brand, I started the group in 2008 and have, with assistance from many others, helped the group to be able to deliver six years of high quality conferences, now with 400+ delegates. The passion for this comes from my personal drive to improve skills in those around me.
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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup May 2014

Date: 19:00pm 7th May 2014

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

This month we have Phil Norton (@philipnorton42 (https://twitter.com/philipnorton42)) who will be talking about Managing Configuration in Drupal 8.

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The configuration management system in Drupal 8 seems like a great idea, but what is it? In this session I hope to show what configuration management is, why it is needed and how it will make all of our lives as Drupal site builders better.

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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

Drupal Sprints Manchester

Date: 10:00am 26th April 2014

We'll be working on Drupal core, contrib and initiatives. If you've ever thought about contributing back to the community then now is a good time!

Schedule:

10:00 Arrival

10:30 Intro

11:00 Sprinting

13:00 Lunch - Pizza sponsored by CTI Digital

14:00 Sprinting

17:00 Close

17:00+ Food/Beer (venue tbd)

Requirements - laptop with *AMP stack and your brain!

More information can be found at - http://mikebell.io/blog/27-09-2013/drupal-sprints-manchester-26th-october

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup

Date: 19:00pm 2nd April 2014

The April NWDUG meetup will take place on 2nd April at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Mike Bell who will be talking about How To Quit Vim, which will be all about command line wizardry.

After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup March 2014

Date: 19:00pm 5th March 2014

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

This month we have Paul Smith who will be talking about the Capturing client requirements on a sticky wall.
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Getting a group of clients and developers to agree on the main requirements for a project is no easy feat. Everybody has their own idea of what’s important, what the steps are and how one feature is actually completely different to that similar one you have. This talk will demonstrate one method for getting everyone to agree right at the start of a project in a practical session. Wall provided.
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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup February 2014

Date: 19:00pm 5th February 2014

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

This month we have Matt Smith who will be talking about the the Drupal 8 Plugin API.

If there is one API in Drupal 8 that you should learn, it’s the Plugin API. This simple yet flexible system is used throughout core and is bound to be used extensively in contributed modules as well. In this talk Matt Smith will demonstrate how plugins are used in modules to provide blocks, text filters and field formatters. We will also look at creating our own plugin manager to allow other modules to extend functionality.

After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

Drupal Worldwide Sprints Manchester 25th January

Date: 10:00am 25th January 2014

Be part of the Drupal Sprint Weekend 2014 and sprint with people from around the world - https://groups.drupal.org/node/332998

We'll be working on Drupal core, contrib and initiatives. If you've ever thought about contributing back to the community then now is a good time!

Schedule:

10:00 Arrival

10:30 Intro

11:00 Sprinting

13:00 Lunch - TBD (get in touch if you'd like to sponsor!)

14:00 Sprinting

17:00 Close

17:00+ Food/Beer

Requirements - laptop with *AMP stack and your brain!

More information can be found at - http://mikebell.io/blog/27-09-2013/drupal-sprints-manchester-26th-october

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup January 2014

Date: 19:00pm 15th January 2014

The January NWDUG meetup will take place on 15th January 2014 at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have don't have a scheduled talk and so we will be doing a question answer session. The idea is that we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group and hopefully find some solutions. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

It is also Drupal's birthday and so we will be eating cake and running a mini sprint to see if we can solve any issues during the meetup.

We usually wrap things up before 9:00 PM and move to a pub.

Come along and join in the Drupal fun!

Drupal Sprints Manchester 7th December

Date: 10:00am 7th December 2013

Come join us for our second Drupal Sprints Manchester.

We'll be working on Drupal core, contrib and initiatives. If you've ever thought about contributing back to the community then now is a good time!

Schedule:

10:00 Arrival

10:30 Intro

11:00 Sprinting

13:00 Lunch - TBD (get in touch if you'd like to sponsor!)

14:00 Sprinting

17:00 Close

17:00+ Food/Beer (venue tbd)

Requirements - laptop with *AMP stack and your brain!

More information can be found at - http://mikebell.io/blog/27-09-2013/drupal-sprints-manchester-26th-october

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup December 2013

Date: 19:00pm 4th December 2013

The December NWDUG meetup will take place on the 4th at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Yan Loetzer (@yanni_boi) who will be talking about the Flexiform Module.

"Flexiform Module - How to build powerful, simple, multiple entity create/edit forms in Drupal 7"

After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

DrupalCampNW 2013 Sprint Friday

Date: 10:00am 22nd November 2013

Come join us for a special Drupal Sprint as part of the DrupalCampNW 2013 event. Whilst the Business day is being held on the Friday we have organised a space so that developers coming along to the weekend conference can meetup the day before and work on Drupal.

We'll be working on Drupal core, contrib and initiatives. If you've ever thought about contributing back to the community then now is a good time!

Schedule:

10:00 Arrival

10:30 Intro

11:00 Sprinting

13:00 Lunch - Pizza courtesy of NWDUG!

14:00 Sprinting

17:00 Close

17:00+ Beer - Port Street Beer House - https://twitter.com/portstreetbeer

Requirements - laptop with *AMP stack and your brain!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup November 2013

Date: 19:00pm 6th November 2013

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

This month we be having 10 minute lightning talks on Drupal, feel free to test out your DrupalCamp NW 2013 talk here! After we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group and hopefully find some solutions. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

Lightning Talks:

- Matt Smith - Drupal 8 Routing in 10 Minutes

- Mike Bell - Vagrant up and You!

- Mark Jones - TBC

- Steph Hosny - "Drupal 8 is coming..."

- YOU!

Drupal Sprints Manchester

Date: 10:00am 26th October 2013

Come join us for our first Drupal Sprints Manchester.

We'll be working on Drupal core, contrib and initiatives. If you've ever thought about contributing back to the community then now is a good time!

Schedule:

10:00 Arrival

10:30 Intro

11:00 Sprinting

13:00 Lunch - Pizza sponsored by CTI Digital

14:00 Sprinting

17:00 Close

17:00+ Food/Beer (venue tbd)

Requirements - laptop with *AMP stack and your brain!

Thanks for reading, I'm hoping that this will take off and become a huge success. If you can think of anyone else who might be interested then please feel free to share the event.

More information can be found at - http://mikebell.io/blog/27-09-2013/drupal-sprints-manchester-26th-october

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup October 2013

Date: 19:00pm 2nd October 2013

The October NWDUG meetup will take place on 2nd October at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Graham Brown who will be talking about the Migrating Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 using Views Data Export and Feeds.
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Most of the time it's just not possible to upgrade a Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 and you have to start from scratch and one of the easiest ways of migrating the mass of content is to use XML and a couple of handy modules. This method is more robust than using node export as it allows you to create bespoke migrations and can still handle the content even if all the field names are different.
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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup September 2013

Date: 19:00pm 4th September 2013

The September NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 4th at MadLab on Edge Street from 7PM until 9PM.

This month we have Mike Bell who will be talking about the Vagrant and Puppet Management. This will be how to develop using Vagrant and manage your Vagrant instances with Puppet. Mike will also be going into Puppet config and using it on remote servers.

After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup August 2013

Date: 19:00pm 7th August 2013

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

This month we have Andrew Macpherson who will be talking about the Field UI API (and some modules which use it).

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Drupal's field formatters offer site builders lots of ways to display their content, but sometimes a few more options are needed.

This session will start with a look at the Field Formatter Settings API module for Drupal 7, which gives developers an easy way to add new settings to field formatters.

Next, we'll take a quick tour through a range of helpful little modules which site builders can use to tweak their content output. Custom field labels, extra text-trimming options, HTML5 data attributes, limiting multiple values... there's a module for all of these!

To round things off we'll look forward to Drupal 8, which takes things a little further. With the new Field UI API and Form Display Modes, extra settings can be applied to field widgets too!

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After the talk we will break off into groups so that people can talk through their Drupal problems with other members of the group. There is nothing formal planned for this, we will just ask if anyone has any problems and if anyone can help them solve it. We are reintroducing this as it is something we haven't done for a while but some members have mentioned that they miss it.

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

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup July 2013

Date: 19:00pm 3rd July 2013

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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup June 2013

Date: 19:00pm 5th June 2013

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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup May 2013

Date: 19:00pm 1st May 2013

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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup April 2013

Date: 19:00pm 3rd April 2013

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

For the March 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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup March 2013

Date: 19:00pm 6th March 2013

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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup February 2013

Date: 19:00pm 6th February 2013

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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup January

Date: 19:00pm 9th January 2013

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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup

Date: 18:00pm 5th December 2012

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!

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup November

Date: 18:00pm 7th November 2012

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!

See the original post here:

http://nwdrupal.org.uk/events/north-west-drupal-usergroup-meetup-november-0

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup October

Date: 18:00pm 3rd October 2012

The October NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 3rd 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 distributions and install profiles. Last month we had a quick talk before we all broke into groups where we tackled how to get Drupal up and running on your system. This seemed to suit all skill levels in the room so if there are no objections we will be doing the same thing again this month.

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!

See the original post. (http://nwdrupal.org.uk/events/north-west-drupal-usergroup-meetup-october-0)

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup September

Date: 18:00pm 5th September 2012

The September NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 5th at MadLab on Edge Street from 6PM until 9PM. The agenda is as follows:

Usual intro stuff. A report from Drupalcon from those members of the group who attended. This month we are going to start on a series of "getting started" sessions. The first step in this process is getting everyone up to speed on everything needed to run Drupal. So bring along your laptop and we'll make sure you have Apache, MySQL and PHP installed. Even if you know all of this we would like you to come along to the session so you can help out, we might not have enough experts to go around. We will then look at what people want to learn about in the coming months and see if anyone is available to talk about it. Drupal news. Questions and help with your Drupal sites. 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!

See the original post on nwdrupal.org. (http://nwdrupal.org.uk/events/north-west-drupal-usergroup-meetup-september-0)

North West Drupal Usergroup Meetup August

Date: 18:00pm 1st August 2012

The August NWDUG meetup will take place on Wednesday 1st at MadLab on Edge Street from 6PM until 9PM. The agenda is as follows:
Usual intro stuff.
Dave Hall will be giving a talk about Beans, a mechanism for creating and using blocks in Drupal. He is in Australia and so will be doing the presentation remotely.
Drupal news.
Questions and help with your Drupal sites.
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!

See more details here: http://nwdrupal.org.uk/events/north-west-drupal-usergroup-meetup-august

North West Drupal User Group

Past Events

NWDUG monthly meetup January 2026

NWDUG monthly meetup December 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup November 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup October 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup October 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup September 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup August 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup July 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup June 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup May 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup April 2025

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG Monthly Meetup March 2024

NWDUG monthly meetup Feb 2024

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup December 2023

NWDUG Monthly Meetup November 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup August 2023

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

Next.js + Drupal workshop with Alex Moreno

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup

NWDUG monthly meetup August 2022

(The smart way to) Managing Factories of sites at Scale with Alex Moreno

Embedding DrupalPod technology in clients' projects with Ofer Shaal

The varieties of development experience with Andrew Harmel-Law

ECA (Event - Condition - Action): New rules engine for Drupal 9+ w/ Jürgen Haas

Online NWDUG March 2022: Code with confidence using PHPStan with Peter Fisher

Online NWDUG February 2022: Getting ready for Drupal 10 with Gábor Hojtsy

NWDUG monthly meeup

Online NWDUG December 2021: Frederik Wouters on Layout Builder, et al!

NWDUG November 2021: Fabian Bircher on Config Split 2.x & the future of CMI2

Online NWDUG September 2021: Ted Bowman on the Automatic Update Module

Online NWDUG August 2021 - Lightning Talks!

Online NWDUG July 2021

Online NWDUG June 2021

Online NWDUG March 2021

Online NWDUG February 2021

Online NWDUG January 2021

Online NWDUG December 2020

Online NWDUG October 2020

Online NWDUG September 2020

Online NWDUG August 2020

Online NWDUG July 2020

Online NWDUG June 2020

Online NWDUG May 2020

NWDUG April 2020

NWDUG March 2020

NWDUG February 2020

NWDUG January 2020

NWDUG December 2019

NWDUG November 2019

NWDUG Unconference 2019

NWDUG September 2019