Last night I attended the Drupal Atlanta user-group meeting, and found it to be a fantastic. enriching experience as someone who uses Drupal both professionally and as a hobby.

Due to the nature of the software, being free, and open source, it tends to have a steep learning curve, and what I learned about it previously was from the wealth of online documentation, forums and video tutorials in addition to the handful of books that have been published.

While the method described above works, it does tend to take some time to reach certain goals, and nothing could quite compare to being in a room of twenty other people who all have a vested interest in the software, many of whom use it for business.

The lesson was on building a podcast site with Drupal, and was presented by Rusty Tanton of the Georgia Podcast Network, who did an excellent job describing concerns about file size limits, user access restriction considerations, creating custom content types, and checking your RSS feed to ensure proper tags. What was great about the learning environment was that Rusty could mention a particular related topic, and in some cases go into greater detail on that subject, or, someone else in the room could provide additional information, a process that might be taken for granted in a traditional classroom situation, but in this case would compare to hours upon hours of thread searching, googling, and more.

While the lesson was a topic I am already fairly familiarized with, I did learn several tips about how Drupal works, and seeing a different perspective on how to do something was really helpful. I'm definitely looking forward to future meetings with the group.