Monday night we had our third Drupal Columbia meet-up at the Richland County Public Library and had 7 attendees.  It was exciting and very encouraging since the first two meetings were only 3 people. 

Most people attending were new to Drupal but I was glad to see some representatives from Pure Fishing (www.purefishing.com) there.  Pure Fishing is a company that owns several well known fishing brands, including Shakespeare, which has long had a presence here in Columbia, and Mitchell, which has a very attractive Drupal Site at www.fishmitchell.com.  

I spent quite a bit of time explaining blocks and CCK and views, and Bob from Pure Fishing took a few minutes to show us the MagicZoom feature used on the Mitchell product pages.  Very impressive, if you asked me-- here's an example:  www.fishmitchell.com/products/reels/avocet%C2%AE-ii-gold-series.    You can read more about Magic Zoom here:  www.magictoolbox.com/magiczoom

Good example of how one person with a clear vision can transform a community.

Recently I've had to do this.  I create a Drupal Content Type using the Location Module and GMAP Module,   I created a Location CCK field and started entering (or importing) location data into the field.

Afterward, I realized that I did not really want a CCK Location Field.  Instead, I wanted to set the Locative information on the configuration page of my content type.  I did NOT want to re-key my location information, and it turns out I didn't need to.  

When you key in Location data to a location CCK field, the Location data is stored in the Location table.  It is stored in the same place when you use locative information.  The only difference is the data that is stored in the Location_Instance table.  Instead of storing a reference to the for a CCK field in genid, it stores the node id in the nid and vid fields.      

I ran the following query to take the node id from the rightmost characters of the genid and use them for the node id, and blank out the genid.  Worked like a charm... 

I found out today that the myrcpl.com site is built with Drupal.  Also found out that an old friend and co-worker from Syneractive (Scottie) helps to manage the site.  It's a great looking site and very well done. 

I love the Richland County Libary (or as Poof  would say, the lye-berry), and I love them even more now.  Next time you're in the library, tell them you love their Drupal site!