Talking Drupal #508 - Drupal User Groups & Meetups

In this episode of Talking Drupal, we dive into the world of Drupal user groups and meetups with guests Lee Walker, Bernardo Martinez, and Bo Shipley. Our guests share their experiences in organizing and participating in Drupal communities and the vital role these meetups play in fostering continuous learning and professional development. We also explore the newest features of Drupal Core 11.2 in the Module of the Week. For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/508 Topics Meet the Guests: Lee, Bo, and Bernardo Module of the Week: Drupal Core 11.2 Diving into Drupal User Groups and Meetups Personal Journeys into Drupal User Groups The Role of Meetup.com in Drupal Communities Organizing and Attending Meetups vs. Conferences Challenges and Strategies for Growing Meetups Virtual and Hybrid Meetups: Impact on Attendance Success Tips for Organizing Meetups Keeping Meetups Simple and Engaging Preventing Organizer Burnout Challenges and Changes in Meetup Cadence Finding and Retaining Meetup Members Communication Tools for Meetup Groups The Importance of In-Person Meetups Advice for Starting or Restarting Meetups Conclusion and Contact Information Resources Drupal.org Events The Drop Times Events Meetup.com Drupal Chattanooga Drupal Users Group Chattanooga Drupal Camp Guests Lee Walker - www.codejourneymen.com mr_scumbag Bo Shipley - simplyshipley Bernardo Martinez - linkedin bernardm28 Hosts Stephen Cross - stephencross John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi JD Leonard - modernbizconsulting.com jdleonard Module of the Week with Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu Drupal Core 11.2 Single Directory Components (SDCs) have been a focus of excitement for Drupal’s front end developers since they were added to Drupal 10.1 as an experimental module, and merged into 10.3 as a stable feature. With Drupal 11.2, SDCs now have a concept of variants, to allow for different ways of presenting a component’s information. Some component frameworks like Storybook have a somewhat different concept of variants, which is really a set of property value presets that are useful for testing. Variants with Drupal SDCs strike me as being analogous to view modes for content types, in that you can have separate template files for each variant, or you can have conditional logic within a single template based on the variant in use. Our own nicxvan, chx, and some others put some significant work into allowing preprocess hooks to be defined as OOP classes, which bring us a significant step closer to not needing .module files anymore. Hooks (and .module files) are Drupalisms, so removing the need for them is a big improvement for Developer Experience, and makes it easier for developers to get started with Drupal In Drupal 11.2 the module installer has been updated to only rebuild the container after several modules have been installed, which significantly speeds up installing multiple modules at once. Drupal 11.2 also brings us a Recipe Unpack composer extension, so when you composer require a recipe, the dependencies get automatically added to your site’s composer.json file, so you can apply and then remove the recipe and still have a fully functional site Package Manager is now a hidden module in Drupal core, which is critical for initiative like Automatic Updates and Project Browser, that the community has been working on for years Drupal core now also supports the next-generation AVIF format, with WEBP as a fallback with servers that don’t support generating them Of course there are also a variety of dependency updates as well, for CKEDitor, Symfony, composer and more, as well as too many minor improvements and bugfixes to cover in detail here