March 13, 2012 DrupalPGH Meetup: Jumpstarting Drupal Development with Vagrant and Git @ Justseeds

Hey everybody. I'll be your organizer this month.

Main Presentation

David King from xForty Technologies will be showing us his method of jumpstarting Drupal development with a Vagrant-Drupal git repo. You can check out the project (git pun, BAM) here.

"Creating consistent and reproducible Drupal development environments can be a time-consuming chore. Project requirements are frequently a unique combination of software vendors and versions. What happens when you need to get the project up and running six months or more down the road just to fix a bug or make an enhancement? What did you do with the development environment you were using originally? What if you aren't doing the work? How do you transfer the development environment to another team member? These are just some of the things that can lead to wasted time when all you want to do is get to the actual (billable) work. During the presentation, we'll talk about how the vagrant-drupal project can be used to help with these types of inefficiencies while at the same time increasing the portability of our Drupal development environment."

David King (dkingofpa) has seven years industry experience as a Java and PHP software developer. For the last two years, his focus has been on site building and custom development using Drupal. He works for xforty technologies in the Mechanicsburg, PA office.

Open Discussion

No case studies this month, so we're going to open the floor for a group discussion. Bring questions on coding, site building, and general Drupal theory to pose to the group, and for best results make them specific -- each subject will get approximately ten minutes of attention before we move on. All levels of questions are welcome.

Location

The next three meetups will take place at local business and organization spaces in Pittsburgh's East End (Bloomfield, Garfield, Friendship, and Lawrenceville).

This month we'll be meeting at the Justseeds gallery at 3410 Penn Avenue (map). For those of you who would like Pittsburgh Directions, that's the old Turner Detective Agency building. Justseeds is an international cooperative of artists and printmakers that create work reflecting a radical social, environmental, or political stance. They moved their headquarters and gallery to Pittsburgh in 2010, and now reside in a handsome brick and exposed frame space above the offices of Bike Pittsburgh.

There's plenty of car parking and two bike racks in front of the building on Penn Avenue. The entrance to the gallery space, along with four additional parking spaces, is around the back on Spring Way.

Refreshments

Probably pizza, but I'm open to suggestions. Throw them in the comments below.