On Saturday 2009 June 20, the Twin Cities Documentation Sprint (that's the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota, USA) will happen from 10AM through 5PM CST being held at Advantage Labs with sponsorships from fivefivefour and Gorton Studios. This event was crowd-sourced at one of our meeting.

We are still figuring out what areas we can focus on, but we don't actually need a specific agenda. If you have some documentation requests, please leave a comment. There will also be some members in the #drupal-docs IRC channel as well.

In the Drupal project page form there is a Project Resources section which includes the ability to add links to, you guessed it, project resources, things like Homepage, Documentation, Screenshots, and a Demo Site.

I only have a few modules that I have contributed to Drupal, and even the ones that I have contributed do not get much foot traffic. Still, I strive to be a good module contributor and maintainer, by doing things like writing good documenting in and outside the code. I also like to have links for all the Project Resources. This is not always possible. Often people (myself included) just link the Documentation to the current README.txt file in the CVS repository. I have started just linking the Changelog category to the CVS messages for the module.

I have always wanted to be able to have an actual place to demo my modules without linking to this specific site. But I never wanted to spend the time both initially and ongoing to create a demo site for each module. It's a fair amount of work, and there is always the issue of security, and concerns of users creating offensive content. So, I never did... until now!

Last night the Twin Cities Drupal User Group had its first, of hopefully many, Drupal Happy Hours. I think it was a big success, and I personally had lots of fun. We thought about what kind of projects we could do as a Drupal group, Advantage Labs raffled off training, drank lots of good Surly beer, had heated discussions about the feasibility of contributing back to Drupal within the non-profit sector, and for some of us, went into the late hours of the night drinking and talking of Drupal. It was like DCDC all over again!

So, Why a Happy Hour?

Is there really a need to answer this question? Not really. But, in wanting to talk about our Drupal community and the larger Drupal community, I would like to explain why I organized this. We already do have a regular meeting (it's the fourth Wednesday of every month at 7PM at Advantage Labs, if you're in the neighborhood). I had two main reasons for organizing this event.

The first being that our regular meetings are more formal. We usually do a presentation style approach where there is one main presenter and then maybe some smaller presentations or talks. It's great and has lots of value, but the meetings are not always that interactive, and are the "presenter and audience" sort of thing. I learn lots of great things, but having just been at DCDC and seeing how much I learned outside the regular conference hours (i.e. drinking), I thought it would be a good idea to bring that informal approach to our fair cities.

Secondly, there are many great Drupalers here in the Twin Cities, that don't make it to the regular meetings. Hell, I don't always make it. But, I think changing the context, time, and place, opens up the local Drupal discussion, and allows for people that otherwise can't make it (for whatever reason) to participate more.

A TCDUG Project, My Second Objective

My first objective was just to get people together and talk (and optionally drink) without any kind of schedule or guidelines (no laptops were opened). But, my second objective was to have a short conversation about ideas for a TCDUG Drupal community project. Meaning that as a group, we decide on a discreet project that we can do in a reasonable amount of time, that helps out the Drupal community as a whole.

We came up with some awesome ideas. The full dynamic list is here, but I will put the initial list below. From the initial discussions, it looks like a documentation sprint is in the lead (I'm sure add1sun will be happy about that).

This past week, drupal.org experienced some down time; which is normal. The infrastructure team does an amazing job keeping things going as smoothly as possible, given the immensely growing community of Drupal.

API Module

But, of course, I needed to reference some functions and hooks at api.drupal.org, the community's resource for code documentation. Fortunately, there are a few places to go that have implemented the fantastic API module to help supplement api.drupal.org or help document their own modules.

• api.freestylesystems.co.uk
• api-drupal.pajunas.com
• drupalecommerce.org/api

This API module basically scans a directory recursively and reads the Drupal Doxygen documentation that is available and creates an easy-to-use interface to browse it all.

Inline Documentation

The API module would not be possible without in-depth, inline documentation in the Drupal code base. (We won't get into the importance of non-inline documentation.) As a programmer, I love some documentation, but I also understand how much of an after thought it usually is for most of. So, even if you think no one will read your code, think again; there's a good chance it will make it's way onto someone else's screen. And if you contribute modules, a good module has good documentation within the code.

What Can I Do?

Well, you should always document your code correctly. But, you can also set up an API site locally and for those other folks on the interwebs.

The first step was to install the API module locally so that if the Internet was not even a possibility, then I could still have an easy interface to reference the Drupal code base.

The second step was to create a public site, in my case api.zzolo.org, to help others have this information when needed. I also put a copy of HEAD up there, started to make a section for contributed modules for Drupal 6, and installed the almost-perfect-for-api-sites-theme, Pixture. Freestyle Systems did a nice job of setting up an API site with contributed module references, and is a good example. I attempted to mimic their ability to browse contributed modules; but mine is not as great as theirs.

How You Can do the Same