Main LA Drupal meetup: Apr 9, 2013 | Case Study: League of Women Voters of California

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ishmael-sanchez's picture
Start: 
2013-04-09 19:00 - 21:00 America/Los_Angeles
Event type: 
User group meeting

Join us Tuesday, April 9, 2013 for our monthly gathering to learn, share, and meet others interested in Drupal. This month our meetup will be at Stauffer Inc (map) and the agenda will include a case study on: League of Women Voters of California by Rain Breaw Michaels.

Mark your calendars for the second Tuesday of each month as "LA Drupal DAY"! This event is FREE!

New Drupal users are encouraged to join us!

Every month experts guide our local community showcasing professional Drupal techniques, industry standards, and best practices. LA Drupal brings a spectacular lineup of topics and presentations centered around Drupal. We help users answer questions, and resolve issues with solutions surrounding planning, supporting, and developing with Drupal. Our meetups are a good place for Job seekers and employers to find talent. Also, we typically have raffle prizes including various Drupal books, DVD's, and subscriptions!!!

The Stauffer team has proudly supported the LA Drupal community for years and is excited to host LA Drupal meetups through the first half of 2013!

Where

Stauffer, Inc.
12540 Beatrice St., Suite #200
Los Angeles, CA 90066

You can park in the Stauffer and/or Activision spaces in the parking lot next the Stauffer office or on the streets, but be mindful of the signage!.

AGENDA


6:45pm-7pm Early Arrivals
* Venue setup
* LA Drupal Open Lab & Users Helping Users - Bring your laptop and Drupal questions, or contribute to an issue in the queue.
* Lightning Talk prep - need help getting a lightning talk together, show up to the pre-meetup lab and we can help!
* Early Networking - looking to chat with folks before the meetup begins, this is your chance.

7pm-9pm
* News & Announcements
* Job announcements (free)
* Presentations
* Lightning Talks (5min ea): Open Floor. Come share something cool, new, and Drupalie! (post a comment to lock in your spot)
* Users Helping Users - bring up a question to the crowd and see how they can help you overcome your latest Drupal roadblock.
* Raffle prizes & Giveaways
* Networking - bring your business cards

9pm-Late
* Drupal After Dark - after the meetup come out to meet new friends, network, grab a drink or bite to eat. Details are posted in a comment each month (sometimes during the meetup). If you have a recommendation, please comment!

Appreciation for our Sponsors

Venue & Wi-Fi: Stauffer Inc: Give a shout! staufferinc

Presentation Details


Case Study: League of Women Voters of California (Multisites) by Rain Breaw Michaels

The League of Women Voters of California moved one of its sites (www.CAvotes.org) to Drupal in 2010 with the help of numerous members of the LA Drupal community. In October, 2012, the remainder of the League's sites, including LWVC.org, were also moved to Drupal. This project faced unusual challenges requiring clever use of tools, including:

  • Constituant data housed in a 3rd party system with a variety of user roles that are distinct on each site
  • Years worth of content
  • Content that needs to both be shared across all sites, but also segregated between sites (e.g. Education Fund content must be non-partisan, opinion-free, but during elections the League does take positions on ballot measures on its general site)
  • Content must go through an extensive review process to ensure all i's are dotted and t's are crossed, as much for legal reasons as professional ones
  • A constantly changing set of content managers for the site (because they have been volunteers and those elected to the board)
  • Specific needs of the sites have changed over time, and the very small League budget has necessitated building in small increments over a long period of time.

Who Should Come?

Everyone is welcome, but if you're a site builder or just into Drupal this will be a real treat!

About the Presenter:

Rain began tinkering with web development in 1998 when it was novel to change the background color on your 100% text-based webpage. She has taught web design and development at UMass Lowell, NY State Community Colleges & Vassar College in the early days "web design." Rain is most interested in standards compliance / accessibility & the open source world, as she views open source and web accessibility as two powerful tools for world-wide social & technological advancement.

Meetup Info


Users Helping Users and open Q&A

The general meetup begins at 7:00pm but the doors open a little earlier for Users Helping Users, which is a chance for members of the community to help and be helped by others with whatever questions and problems they're having with Drupal. Please note that while Users Helping Users is not designed to be a replacement for bonafide consulting from a Drupal professional that there are plenty of Drupal experts and professionals who attend our meetups and sometimes they need help, too!

Lightning talks

We have time as well for lightning talks, which are 5 minute presentations from attendees who would like to share something with the group. If you'd like to give a lightning talk, be sure to come a few minutes early and bring your laptop (and power and display cables) and whatever else you need.

As always, please feel welcome to leave a comment below and let others know what you'd like to present ahead of time.

Job announcements

At the beginning of each meetup LA Drupal provides an opportunity for local businesses to make job announcements and ask for referrals and recommendations.

Raffle! Prizes! Collect them all!

We love our sponsors and have several raffle prizes from our sponsors in the Los Angeles area and around the world. If you or your company would like to sponsor a raffle prize at the LA Drupal meetups, please come early or contact the LA Drupal managers.

Breakout Groups

As we've occasionally done, we'll split up into groups (sometimes called BoFs, or birds of a feather) and each group can jump into a particular topic that's set at the beginning of the meetup. The topics for these BoFs so far have ranged from high performance websites, Features-driven development, PCI compliance and general "getting started" discussions.

What to bring

Bring a co-worker, maybe your laptop or tablet, but definitely bring your business cards for networking. We do a lot of networking!

About LA Drupal


LA Drupal is Southern California's largest hub for all things Drupal, and is one of the world's largest regional Drupal user groups. We host a monthly meeting on the second Tuesday of every month. LA Drupal also produces the annual DrupalCamp LA conference, one of the largest annual volunteer Drupal networking and training events world-wide since 2007.

There are also other member led social gatherings and meetups throughout the southland. Visit http://groups.drupal.org/la/events for more details.

Attending LA Drupal events is one of the best ways to meet and talk with other Drupaleros and we encourage you to attend meetings and special events regularly. Whether it's about finding solutions to problems you've been having, sharing something you've learned or just meeting interesting like-minded people, the LA Drupal events are an essential resource for Drupal professionals and hobbyists alike.

How to become a member of LA Drupal


If you aren't already part of LA Drupal, it's easy to become a member (read below). LA Drupal has over 1,500 members, the official ways to become a member is by joining the LA Drupal group here: http://groups.drupal.org/la

  1. First, create an account at Drupal.org, which is the "master" site of groups.drupal.org.
  2. Once you have your Drupal.org account and have logged in, go to the LA Drupal home page at http://groups.drupal.org/la
  3. Finally, click the Join link found in the right sidebar. You'll be a member of LA Drupal after confirming your membership.

As a member of the LA Drupal community, you can participate in discussions, sign up & RSVP for events, post job announcements, vote, and send direct messages to people (via the "contact" tab on their profiles), and more.

LA Drupal welcomes you!

Changes and Notifications

For any changes to our agenda for the evening, stay tuned to this meetup announcement or click the Sign up button below to be notified when the agenda has been updated.

Comments

This looks awesome! I recall

Techivist's picture

This looks awesome! I recall Rain mentioning her work on these cool projects a few years ago so I'm looking forward to hearing from her expertise about how the projects have come along. It's also darn great to hear that the stakeholders loved Drupal so much, they migrated the rest of their existing web properties to Drupal. :)

Cya'll then!

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

Potential Lightning Talk

TommyK's picture

If people are interested I can give a brief show-and-tell on a little tool I use called git-ftp (https://github.com/resmo/git-ftp).

I use it to push changes to sites where I do not have the ability to install git on the server, like some shared hosting providers.

It's really handy and other people might find it useful. I'm not sure if it's ever been mentioned before at a meetup.

That tool sounds very useful,

Techivist's picture

That tool sounds very useful, Tommy! I, for one, hadn't heard of it so I'd be interested to see it in action.

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

I've got this situation on a

jstoller's picture

I've got this situation on a site right now. I'd love to see a demo.

Any chance of a hangout

patrickfgoddard's picture

Any chance of a hangout (virtual) for this one?

Same question here. Also, do

Techivist's picture

Same question here. Also, do these get recorded for future consumption? Cool presentation & lightning talk topics but I might not be able to make it out in time. Stupid scheduling gods... :(

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

Sounds like you need to

fejn's picture

Sounds like you need to change gods.... See you whenever.

Haha, true, Jeff! Or stop

Techivist's picture

Haha, true, Jeff! Or stop working on cool projects! I just landed a very important client. ;)

But, ya, I'm in the same boat as Oliver. :(

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

Third this request

oseldman's picture

I was planning to attend this meetup for the featured presentation (and now there are a bunch of lightning talks I'd like to hear too), but I may be unable to attend in person.

Can one of the organizers please facilitate setting up a hangout (and recording it)? PLEASE?

Pretty please with a cherry

Techivist's picture

Pretty please with a cherry on top?!!!

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

Thank you Joe!

oseldman's picture

Working great.

Thanks for setting up the

Techivist's picture

Thanks for setting up the hangout, again, Joe!

Rain: awesome presentation! I only got to see part of it but even that was very informative! THANKS!

Anyone got slides of their talks, lightning or otherwise?

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

I'd like to do a lightning

BTMash's picture

I'd like to do a lightning talk on my new drush plugin which loads all content on the site into the caching tables for serving content quickly.

chellman's picture

If we're not totally gorged on lightning talks, I could do a quick one on using Migrate with XML as the source. I'm working on a big Squarespace to Drupal migration right now, and while they let you export your site, it's in the form of one giant, gnarly, undocumented XML file. Fun!

I'll be interested to hear

fejn's picture

I'll be interested to hear how you are managing this one. I'm looking at importing a huge XML file to get site content also.

Photos

chellman's picture

Here are a few photos from tonight:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cleversticks/sets/72157633211364440/

I didn't investigate how to record the hangout, so that's not available, but I did record audio of most of Rain's presentation, so if that's of interest, I can post that. We didn't end up having time for lightning talks.

Remembered more on why we didn't use varnish

BTMash's picture

When we first set up the site on the server (which I believe was either late 2009 or early 2010), the first site (http://cavotes.org) also has a mobile component (you will see a 'Mobile or Single Column' link in the top right portion of the page). The site also sniffed the user agent and would serve the rich or mobile version of the content. Varnish would be serving the content directly and thus was not an option. We also used drush and wget to cache critical content / pages, respectively.

All in all, however, the switch from using mod_php to mod_fastcgi (and for those that start now, switch to php-fpm) resolved a number of issues on not having a server die due to php processes spinning out of control (and would be able to facilitate LWVC staff logging into the server to make changes just fine given the various other things we were doing to make sure pages / content were cached).