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Introduction

Perl Mongers is the term used to describe both the participants of certain groups of Perl users, as well as the organization which is composed of the loose association of said Perl User Groups from all over the world.
Perl Monger groups have different goals, but all are composed of Perl users who like to talk with and meet their fellow Perl Mongers.
Specifically, the Israeli Perl Mongers (Israel.pm) is the Israeli Perl user group registered at the International Perl Mongers site. It is composed of Perl users of various levels, from total beginners who have yet to write "Hello, World" to veteran Perl programmers -- all are welcome.
The goals of the Israeli Perl Mongers are first and foremost to facilitate communication and mutual help between Israeli Perl Mongers, and secondly to advance the usage of Perl in Israel and to disseminate information about our favourite programming language to the programming community in Israel.
To fulfill its goals, Israel.pm:

  1. Has built this site, to host archives, local content and to feature local Perl related news items.
  2. Has several mailing lists dedicated to Perl. This is the main avenue of participation for the majority of Israeli Perl users.
  3. Holds monthly meetings that feature 2 or more Perl (or programming in general) related lectures. For the Israeli Perl Mongers, this is the main avenue by which we meet and socialize.
  4. Has held yearly conferences (for the past 2 years, with hopefully more to come), through which Israel.pm has exposed a wider audience to a full day of back to back Perl lectures given by members of the community.

Anyone may become a member of Israel.pm, by simply registering to the mailing list. Registration is free, but is required to keep the mailing list spam free. Participation in the monthly meetings is also free.

Current Officers

Israel.pm is lead by Gabor Szabo, who is also its founder. When he is not acting in his capacity as Israel.pm's fearless leader, Gabor manages his own Perl training company, appropriatly named Perl Training Israel.

Until about the beginning of 2004, nearly all of the routine work involving the running and organization of Israel.pm has fallen on the shoulders of Gabor Szabo. Since then, several Perl Mongers have stepped up to help him run various aspects of the group:

History

The Israeli Perl mailing list was originally setup by Gabor to allow students who attended a recent Perl course given by Gabor to ask him further questions. The first email to the list was sent on Friday, April 27, 2001.
From these humble beginnings Israel.pm has grown to be one of the largest and most active Perl Users groups in the world, with hundreds subscribed to the mailing list and an increasing volume of emails sent each year.
The weekly Perl meetings have also been progressing nicely. The initial meeting, which took place at March 18, 2002, was a small meeting with only 6 people, no set agenda and no regular place to meet. However, since about June 2003 Dapey Zahav have kindly donated the use of a room and overhead projector. Thanks to this set location, great participation by Perl Mongers willing to prepare lectures, and the organization of Gabor Szabo, the Israeli Perl Mongers have since then met regularly, with an attendence of usually about 15-25 people. Recently the Perl Mongers have started to follow-up the technical session with a social one, going together after the lectures are over to a nearby pub. Hopefully this will continue and become a tradition :-)

About This Site

The new Israel.pm site is an HTML::Template based site, with the look being based on the Gila template, which was downloaded from the Open Source Web Design site.
The site sources are managed under Subversion, and can be downloaded using the command:
svn co http://svn1.hostlocal.com/perl.org.il/
If you have commit access to the repository you need to use the other address:
svn co https://svn1.hostlocal.com/perl.org.il/ On Windows you can use TortoiseSVN to access the repository.
If you feel like contributing to the site, please do the following:

  1. Check out the source code from the Subversion repository with the above command.
  2. Make your changes in the new_site_sources directory. Content should nearly always be changed in the templates/*.tmpl files.
  3. Run perl update_site.pl in the new_site_sources directory and check (in the "./site" directory by default) if the changes were correct.
  4. Run svn diff > diff.txt while in the new_site_sources directory.
  5. Send the diff.txt file to the webmaster.

If they accept the patch they will apply it to the repository and then to the site.