Montreal Drupal Meetup at Notman House

Montreal's March Drupal Meetup was held this past Wednesday at Notman House, a co-working space and hub for entrepreneurship and tech innovation in Montreal. I think the exciting new venue was at least partly responsible for the fantastic turnout of 28 Drupal enthusiasts. We met in the Notman House Cafe, a large room with lots of chairs and laptop tables. A huge thanks to the crew at Notman House for letting us use the space. Also thanks to Simone Pereira for organizing the event and to all the attendees and presenters for making it happen!

Five presenters gave talks about various Drupal modules. Here's a taste of what they presented on:

Benoit Borrel: Semantic Similarity Module Demo

Benoit from ESPEO presented his Semantic Similarity Module, which measures how similar nodes are to each other. The module integrates with R, a statistics tool that he uses to implement a semantic analysis algorithm, modeling the nodes as vectors. The module creates a score for each pair of nodes to determine whether the nodes are duplicate, or complementary. Use cases for the module include detecting duplicate content entered by users, and generating a list of related or 'complementary' nodes for the current node.

Ryan Weal: Node Tasklist Module Demo

Ryan Weal, a Montreal-based Drupal freelancer, demoed his Node Tasklist Module, which he's developing in a sandbox on Drupal.org. The module manages tasklist nodes, which store a list of tasks or questions, which can be updated on the fly. When you visit a node page, the module displays a simplified edit form for the node so you can update it. After you save the node, the edit page is displayed again so you can continually update your to-do list. You can see Ryan's module in action on his website.

Suzanne Kennedy: The i18n Module for Drupal 7

I presented on the i18n Module for Drupal 7. I started with a breakdown of what the core Locale and Content Translation modules do in Drupal 7. Then I discussed how the i18n module has changed, and specifically how to configure the settings and features for each submodule. My slides are online at http://bit.ly/hQBh64.

Sylvain Aubé: Localization, Multilingual Best Practices, and Contributed Modules

Sylvain from Whisky Echo Bravo started his bilingual presentation with an overview of localize.drupal.org, including how to pull in translations from the localization server and how to contribute new translations. Sylvain also discussed techniques for building a site with a default language other than English. His slides, which you can see here: http://goo.gl/D4TvT, include a very useful list of other multilingual contributed modules.

Robin Millette: Feeds Module Presentation

Robin blew away the crowd with a demo of the almost-magical Feeds module and its ilk, showing how to use them to easily pull online data into Drupal. He showed us the UI for the Feeds Module, which can import RSS feeds, OPML files, and other data sources. The XPath Parser and QueryPath Parser modules extend the Feeds module to import HTML elements using either XPath or CSS syntax. The Feeds Tamper Module allows you to alter data from a feed before saving it as a node in Drupal. Robin also explained how he was using the Feeds Node Multisource Module to pull content from different feeds into the same set of nodes.

DrupalCamp Montreal 2011 Discussion

The evening summed up with a discussion about DrupalCamp Montreal 2011. Montreal has held a DrupalCamp in October for the last three years. The tentative plan is to hold the next camp at the end of September and to decide on a location within the next month. For those interested in organizing or contributing to the camp, see the wiki page on groups.drupal.org.