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