Fun and Games at Denver Drupal Meetup

Yesterday was the Denver Drupal User Group Meetup. In the holiday spirit, we decided to do something a bit different - DrupalGames. It all started with a conversation in our local IRC channel, #drupal-colorado. After some discussions about possible rules and game play, we decided on taking some inspiration from the Food Network's Chopped TV show.

The evening started the same as always, with beer and pizza provided by Aten Design Group. We had attendees introduce themselves by name and drupal.org user id. We took this information to create the teams - spreading out the veterans and those who joined drupal.org last week equally. We ended up with 5 teams each with 4-5 team members.

Drupal-games rules

• Each team was assigned three random modules from a hand-selected list of about 20.
• Teams were then given a little over an hour to find a creative way of combining those modules into a functioning site.
• You are allowed to download any additional modules, but the three selected modules must be the focal point of the site.

At the end of the hour, teams presented their creations to the group. Most teams ended up writing a few lines of custom code. It was really quite amazing to see how each team combined the three modules creatively.

The creations

Our list of modules to randomly select from was: Date, Fivestar, Vote up/down, Organic Groups, Location, Thickbox, Flag, Views Calc, Views slideshow, User points, Embedded Media Field, Draggable Views, Rules, Feeds, Colorpicker, Workflow, Taxonomy Image, Imagecache actions, and Twitter.

The first team was assigned Location, Vote Up/Down and Rules and created a Black Friday location and deals site which plotted user-contributed deals on to a google map.

The second team was assigned Views Calc, Workflow, and Twitter made a fake company, GreasyBird, which allowed employees to submit expenses and tweets the total amount approved by the company.

The third team was assigned Draggable Views, Fivestar, and Workflow and created a site for rating the quality of a Drupal site by using draggableviews to submit fivestar votes.

The fourth team was assigned Imagecache Actions, Vote Up/Down, and Colorpicker. Their site allowed users to upload images and select a color. The image was then displayed on the site framed and matted with the color selected. Users then vote on images to select the most popular.

The fifth team was assigned Colorpicker, Flag, and Userpoints. They created a site which allowed users to create color pallets which were then flagged by users as being "cool". Actions on the site, such as leaving comments, creating pallets, and voting gave users points.

Possible improvements

There's obviously some things that we could have done better. An hour is not quite enough time. I think a 1.5 - 2 hours would be ideal for site building, but that leaves little time for show and tell, and makes for a long meetup. However, the trade off is a bit more time to build and a little less rush. There's even a discussion thread to make this a weekend activity.

Also, make sure the modules you preselect have working releases! The second team had difficulty configuring the twitter module given the time constraints; however, they did create a custom theme and an awesome logo!

Beneficial for all skill levels

A game of this sort was beneficial for everybody that attended the meetup. Those who were completely new had the opportunity to see the real power of Drupal's modularity. The veterans had a chance to teach along the way, and I think everybody had a lot of fun. We ended the evening, as usual, at a bar for more beer and grub.

The Colorado Drupal community meets in Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Grand Junction - each once a month. Be sure to check out our g.d.o page for upcoming events: http://groups.drupal.org/denver-boulder-colorado-user-group-dbug. See you at the next meetup!