Sydney Drupal usergroup meeting 16/10/2008

I went to the Sydney Drupal Usergroup - October Meetup last night - my first one in Sydney. previously I've only been to the drupal sessions at fosdem 2005 in Brussels as I'd never been to Brussels and wanted to see what it was like. I'd been using drupal for a couple of years at the time and was testing upgrades. initially this site was a custom made php site that I coded to let me do data entry for events / news items and display them on the site in the same format I used for the mail lists which had been running for a few years prior to the site - so at the time, the custom php site saved me time. but also I found I spent a lot of time getting the site to work and adding new features, so when a friend (thanks Damian) asked me over to try out some CMS's including Drupal and we got it working in about an hour, I was hooked! the format of the articles was not exactly the same as what the previous site had been using, but it was so much easier to manage! I can't remember the exact date I moved the site to drupal, but by looking at the the wayback machine pages, it seems to have been in june / july 2003 - maybe 23rd july??

slideshow of fosdem 2005 :

other drupal articles on this site

so, back to the Sydney meeting...
I was surprised to see so many people there - probably around 25-30 people. I hadn't realised drupal was so popular in Australia - though to be honest, I hadn't really checked for a few years. even the European and USA conferences and meetings are really popular now! great to see!! and there's so many books available.

16/10/2008
notes (point form) :

export to csv - custom module
- using drupal as an application rather than a website
- write the query for the CCK fields
- create array - of all the fields in results of query
- save to a string
- "implode" function - to split the array back to fields
- use "x", format for csv (or specify format) & add newline after each row
- write to browser :
Content-type : text/x-comma-separated-values --> done with drupal_set_header
- use hook_exit to close / cleanup : module_invoke_all("exit");
exit; for php exit

:::

modules
- nice menus (drupal 5.1)
- article search --> CCK views search on "article" CCK content type
- blocks -> to arrange different sections on page (panels)
- "clone" to create templates (copies of existing)
- frontpage - redirects (used in example here for single login)
- linking presentation content types --> node reference in drupal 6