I recently gave a talk for the Toronto Drupal Users' Group on managing a Drupal project with the Subversion version control system (VCS) and Trac, the project management utility.

The meeting was at the Centre for Social Innovation, where we've been meeting lately as we've outgrown the Linuxcaffe. When I initially suggested this topic, there was quite a bit of interest so I wasn't surprised when approximately 25 folks showed up.

Once I found the projector and set it up, I had a little bit of trouble getting it work with the Ubuntu installation on my notebook computer. Luckily there were enough folks around who helped me resolve the issue. Basically, I needed to change the resolution on my wide-screen monitor from 1280x800 to 1024x768 and then log in again (or reboot) to match the projector's supported resolution.

The talk went well, with lots of group discussion. This is preferable, at least for me, during an open-source lecture. Feedback, corrections and interruptions are always welcome! At one point, we went off on a bit of a tangent with respect to conceptualizing Subversion (SVN) from a CVS perspective. I recommended that CVS users read the Version Control with Subversion book, otherwise known as Red Bean.

I apologize to André Molnar, the other speaker of the evening, for taking a long time to get through all of my slides. I suppose there's a trade-off between encouraging group discussion and actually getting through a presentation. He was able to get through his slides (mostly discussing his svn:externals trick) even though he was somewhat rushed. It seemed as though nobody was in a hurry to leave so we were able to field some more questions at the end.

Overall, I think it was a positive event and it created several branching off points for future discussions such as managing content changes between development and production sites. For those of you that have been requesting my slides, I apologize for the delay! They can be found as an attachment to this blog post. Make sure that you've got Open Office installed, or you probably won't be able to see them.