Detroit Drupal User Group Wrap Up

Last night we had the second Detroit Drupal Users Group meet-up where we covered drupal usability, building a photo gallery with CCK and Views, and breadcrumbs in all their dysfunction.

Up front we talked about drupal usability because a discussion started about two sites that were entirely built with drupal and then scrapped because of the administration and content creation interfaces. ouch. This lead us into looking at the Root Candy administration theme and the Vertical Tabs module. This was a definite reminder at how high a priority usability needs to be in drupal 7.

I followed that up by building a photo gallery using ImageField, ImageCache, and Views in about 45 minutes while we talked through each step and the decisions one might make from ImageCache sizes, the performance implications , and some differences between ImageMagick and GD2.

This led into a breadcrumb discussion where everyone was in agreement that drupal breadcrumbs are rarely useful out of the box. We discussed a number of different ways to approach breadcrumbs both philosophically and with actual modules or custom code.

The meeting was an overall success and we're looking forward to the November meeting.