Last night I attended the monthly San Diego Drupal Group meeting, a roughly two hour session targeted at drupal enthusiasts and companies looking to find solutions using drupal :) and must say that I enjoyed the gathering.

It's been a while since my last blog post but for good reason - our web development work load has grown quickly in the last 6 months.  Here at Best Rank, our core competency is SEO, but we also develop web sites and sometimes I feel that we don't often blog about our expertise in that area.

I've moved our dev team into drupal over the last 18 months and have found developing websites from scratch is a snap, meaning we're able to build sites from the ground up using a combination of drupal and custom configurations in a matter of minutes - and then of course building custom modules, themes, views, etc. for special features is more of an efficient process than I ever could have hoped for, using drupal.  For example, with drupal we can build static, simple web pages or dynamic, database driven applications using a single framework and without much effort.  So, to say the least, we're pretty thrilled :)

Back to my drupal group meeting: some of the topics that came up last night were

• geocaching - kind of a fun "you hide this item in a random geo location and pin point it on the web then other people can go and find it" type of game (if you have free time that is)
• the views bulk operations module - a very interesting addition to drupal that lets you edit multiple nodes in place and or perform operations on N number of nodes at once in a view (smell an inbox/email application in the works)
• geocoding - this was my quick, 5 minute speech where I discussed how we solved the bug in the Location drupal module that prevents the zipcode search from working right out of the box.
• a look at the features behind rifftrax.com
• an in-depth look at css and floating for cross browser compatibility
• and a nice presentation on Drush.  Drush looks nice because we can run complex operations such as download the latest drupal core release or activating modules, etc. using simple alias commands right on the command line and instead of going through the s-l-o-w web interface.

I'm going to try and make the monthly drupal group meeting so if you'd like to listen to me talk about drupal or just want to say hi, then see you there!