DrupalACT Meetup June 2024: Event Recap and Highlights

The June 2024 DrupalACT Meetup took place last week at Pragma in Canberra, drawing around 30 in-person attendees despite the cold and rain, along with 5-6 online participants from Australia and New Zealand. The event, organized by Margery Tongway and Michael Richardson, featured two insightful presentations and started with a community update. 

"The DrupalACT meetup is primarily an in-person event, and while we do offer a hybrid option to join online, that aspect is more observation than fully interactive."

Our request for a detailed wrap-up about the meetup was graciously accepted by the organizers and  Margery gave us a picture of the whole event. We thank her and the team for their cooperation and commitment.

The meetup officially began at 6:15 PM AEST with a community update delivered by the organizers, providing the latest news and developments within the Drupal community.

The first presentation was delivered by Alex Monaghan and Brynn Briedis, focusing on "Designing Data in Drupal." They demonstrated their technical solution to streamline multiple and inconsistent datasets to be consumed by a Drupal website, ensuring that consumers received only the data they requested. Their talk covered the methods used to import and clean data, store it in a SOLR instance, and utilize VueJS on the front end to present the data back to users. This technical deep dive showcased the effectiveness of integrating various technologies to handle complex data management tasks within Drupal.

"The second presentation was a less technical talk aimed at developers or site builders by Toby Wild."

"Content Editors Are People Too" aimed at developers and site builders and the entertaining talk highlighted the importance of good UI design for content editors. He demonstrated scenarios where a bad UI could go terribly wrong on a large scale and emphasized how creating a better UI for content authors can significantly improve their everyday work experience. His engaging and humorous approach made the session both informative and enjoyable. Toby is scheduled to present this talk again at the upcoming Melbourne meetup.

The event concluded at 8:00 PM AEST, marking the end of another successful DrupalACT meetup. Pragma hosted the event at their office on Level 13, 12 Moore Street, Canberra City. Ironstar joined hands with the event, strengthening it with sponsorship.

"Thank you to Pragma for hosting the event, and Ironstar for their ongoing sponsorship of the DrupalACT meetups. These events are run on a volunteer basis, and we appreciate anyone who contributes back to this section of the Drupal community."

said Margery.

Recordings of the presentations may be available on the DrupalSouth YouTube channel for those who could not attend. The next DrupalACT meetup is scheduled for Wednesday, 14 August, and will be hosted by Annex. This ongoing series of meetups continues to foster a vibrant and collaborative Drupal community in Canberra and beyond.