September « 2009 « Melbourne PHP Users Group

When?

6.30pm for a 7pm start, Monday 21st September 2009.

Where?

Room 18, Level 3
Building 8, RMIT
368 Swanston St

What?

Rapid Web Development with Drupal by Shaun Moss

Drupal use cases and the 3 aspects of Drupal development
Pros and cons of Drupal
Drupal concepts
Drupal modules – types, most popular, installation, configuration
Drupal theming
Nodes, content management, content types, CCK
Regions, menus, blocks and views
Users, roles, permissions
Drupal module development, hooks
Drupal community

This will be very much an introduction to Drupal, as we will not have enough time to go deep into the details. Drupal is a large and complex ecosystem and takes years to learn. However, this presentation will expose you to the most important things needed to understand what Drupal is all about and how to get started.

Shaun Moss has been programming since childhood, commercially since age 16. Initially working with Turbo Pascal and then C++, amongst other things, he discovered ASP about 10 years ago and decided to focus on web apps. Shaun switched to PHP/MySQL in 2001, then started using Drupal about 1 year ago. His education is in computer science, maths and engineering, and he has worked in other roles including salesperson, manager, teacher and draftsperson. His main interests are humanitarianism, environment and space, and his goal is to use web-based software and social networking to change the world.

Source Control Management by Ben Balbo

Working on projects in teams raises issue with regards to file management. Multiple developers working on the same set of files can often result in data loss and requires manual merging of changes. Even when developers use their own development environments to avoid data loss, identifying the current version of a file and keeping the development environments up-to-date is an arduous process.

Source Control Management (SCM) provides a mechanism for teams to work on the same files without clobbering each others’ changes and track the file versions. An added advantage is the storage of previous versions of files and the ability to view or revert to these old versions.

Ben will give an introduction to Subversion, a popular SCM tool, and demonstrate its use in a number of scenarios. The presentation will include:

Creating Subversion repositories
Basic Subversion use
Conflict resolution
Branching and Tagging
Change back-porting

Ben Balbo is a Melbourne-based PHP developer by day and a gardener, systems engineer and financial director by night. He has been known to talk in public, both locally and internationally, on open source and development related topics, which comes as part of the package of being an organiser for both the Melbourne PHP Users Group and BarCampMelbourne and on the committee of the Open Source Developers’ Club and Linux Users of Victoria. Although he wouldn’t admit this, his participation at this level is secretly only in order to go to restaurants or pubs after the meetings. Ben enjoys beer, coffee and Italian food.