First Drupal Meet-Up in Charlottetown, PEI

On August 3rd, Evolving Web was in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and we had the chance to attend PEI's first Drupal Meet-Up. The meet-up was a great success and the 11-person turnout was impressive, particularly given Charlottetown's small population.

The meet-up was hosted by Resonance Development and was held at UPEI. UPEI was one of the first universities anywhere to start using Drupal, so their team of developers is highly steeped in Drupal culture.

The UPEI team is currently working on a mobile version of their site, which would allow students and visitors to more easily navigate the school's campus and get up-to-date information about emergencies and events.

Matt Campbell, a native Islander who now works for the Liberal Party in Ottawa demoed Michael Ignatieff's new website covering the government's economic recovery efforts: http://onprobation.ca.

Ryan Palmer from Resonance Development talked about the advantages of the Apache Solr module, particularly its usefulness on the Parlimentary Monitoring Group site, a content-rich government-run website in South Africa: http://www.pmg.org.za.

We followed up the Apache Solr demo with a demo of Bougex.com a site that integrates Solr JS with Drupal, allowing users to instantly see serach results and use several JQuery-based filters including location, date, and price: http://bougex.com/search/activities.