The Twin Cities PHP User Group is a community for people developing software and web applications using PHP and other open source tools. We meet monthly and run an email list for Minnesotans and approved Wisconsonites interested in sharing ideas and advocating these technologies.
Drupal is a powerful content management system that is powering the new tcphp.org site.
There's been a lot of buzz on the mailing list about Drupal, and lots of questions about how it compares to Mambo, Postnuke and others. There's also interest in understanding how to set up a Drupal site and build new modules.
This link was posted to the TCPHP mailing list Feb 24, 2005 by Daniel J. Post. He found it on http://phparchitect.com/. I found it informative and thought others might too.
Since most of our members are local, collaboration on an open source project would be both practical and fun. Since our very first meetings, we have discussed this, but as of yet nobody has attempted to head up such an effort.
The Twin Cities PHP user group is only as strong as its contributors. The basic needs such as meeting space, mail and list hosting have been taken care of and now it's up to members to make this a useful resource everyone.
It's not always easy to keep a free resource like TCPHP going strong. Fortunately, there have always been members and Minneapolis/ St. Paul companies willing to give back to the group.
If you would also like to help, subscribe to the organizer's list and begin sharing your ideas.
description:
What: Monthly Meeting: TBA. Have ideas? Please share!
Where: The Renaissance Box
509 Sibley Street
St. Paul, MN 55101
612.605.5343
RenBox Directions MapQuest Directions
Location:
The Renaissance Box, 509 Sibley Street, St. Paul
On the surface, the three-year-old Drupal system is optimized for community oriented sites, providing clean, XHTML-compliant, CSS layouts in a default installation. An important design consideration for many in the development community is user-friendly, accessible code that works for those with disabilities.
The core is in active development, and not only provides a good base for sites focused on community building, but also efficiently glues together different components and technologies. This allows Drupal to have many out-of-the-box features such as distributed authentication, community authoring, and extensive support for RSS output. Even RSS aggregation is supported, allowing Drupal to act as an online news aggregator in the style of Bloglines or MyYahoo.
Zend maintains a variety of news resources for PHP developers. One I ran across today in the Developer Zone is PEAR/PECL News.
PEAR
stands for PHP Extension and Application Repository, a collection of
standardized scripts and snippets which are extremely useful. PECL
is the acronym for PHP Extension Community Library, which is a library
of extensions to PHP written in the C language (not sure if this is
This O'Reilly book is a great reference for CLI users. If that term
isn't at the tip of your tongue, you might understand why I think it
has some serious limitations.
Thanks to those of you who attended the 2/15 meeting!
We had a great turnout and a lively discussion. As promised, the information I presented about operon is available here: http://www.developerfocus.com/projects/operon/
If you have any further questions, feel free to track me down. Please
consider joining the developers and/or announcement lists and be part
of the project!
