Islandora Code Club

[Bryan Brown]

I'd like to formally extend an invitation to anyone interested to join the Islandora Code Club. Born out of a Drupal Code Club that I floated to the Drupal4Lib list serve some months ago after hearing Coral Sheldon-Hess talk about code clubs at Code4Lib, I soon realized that Drupal is too big a topic for one group. There are plenty of subtopics within Drupal that different people might be interested in, and enough people in the group were specifically interested in Islandora to warrant its own subgroup (currently the only one meeting).

We had our first meeting today with Mark Bagget from University of Tennessee, Tommy Keswick from The Cherry Hill Company and myself, and we all expressed an interest in several topics:

1. Better understanding how Islandora/tuque works at the code level

2. Better understanding how solution packs work

3. Wanting to be better community members by getting competent enough to help out with bugs

4. Reviewing the Islandora 2.x branch so that we understand the changes and decisions being made (and can help bring more opinions to the table)

5. Helping to rewrite certain modules for the 2.x branch

As you can see from our goals above, the general purpose of the group is to churn out more Islandora contributors by bootstrapping our collective knowledge and get more people taking an active role in development.  We'll be meeting every Thursday at 11:30 EDT over google hangout to explore a different module for roughly 1-1.5 hours. We decided to investigate simple solution packs first, and then move on to the core Islandora module & tuque lib later when we understand how they are being used. The first module we will be taking a look at is the basic image solution pack, which we will be discussing next Thursday, July 2.

If this interests you, feel free to join our google group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/d4lcc. The group itself is for Drupal in general, but there is a single thread devoted to the Islandora subgroup. You may also email me directly if interested (bjb...@fsu.edu). If we can get enough people, we may form a second group that meets at a different time. The group is open to developers and nondevelopers alike, we don't assume any Drupal knowledge but it certainly helps. If you are a Drupal/Islandora pro, we'd certainly appreciate your expertise as well.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a code club, you can find more information at http://bloggytoons.com/code-club/.

-Bryan