Meeting

Greetings Bay Area Drupalers,

Wow, BADCamp was super-successful. Hundreds of people got a chance to meet each other, ask questions, share what they know, build community and contribute to Drupal itself. I hear a bunch of work got done on the DrupalConSF site, and there was a somewhat working version of Views for Drupal 7 by the end of the weekend.

But I am sure some of you still have questions to ask, and tips to share. So come on by this months Berkeley Drupal Users group for our annual after-BADCamp open Q&A.

Greetings Bay Area Drupalers,

Greeting Bay Area Drupalers,

This month we have some tasty treats for your Drupal barbecue.

Michelle Ziegmann, of Educational Technology Services here on campus, will be showing off the great new Drupal-based site they have just rolled out: http://ets.berkeley.edu. She will be talking about their IA, UI design and some cool and less common modules they used (including Node Relationship, ThemeKey, Revisioning/Workflow, and CAS).

Greeting Bay Area Drupers,

Is the relentless beautiful weather getting you down? No problem. You can exchange the glorious summer sun this Thursday for a double helping of Drupal goodness.

Search and Drupal has been a huge topic this year, as Acquia has been pouring resources into integrating Apache Solr. Andre Angelantoni will be presenting on his experience customizing Apache Solr for France Telecom and Cleantech.com. He will be showing how to implement faceted search, which combines the best of traditional searching and browsing.

This month we are looking at monitoring your existing Drupal site.

Jen Lampton, of Jeneration and Chapter 3, will show off her new Total Control Admin Dashboard module (http://drupal.org/project/total_control), which leverages Views and Panels to create a replacement for the default Drupal Admin page.

And Chris Bryant, of Gravitek Labs, will present work they have done on enhancing Drupal statistics.

Jen & Chris are both seasoned Drupal pros, and long time BDUG contributors. It should be a fun meeting.

See you all there,
Tao Starbow

This month we are focusing on Security and Drupal, with presentations by Neil Drumm, the Drupal 5 co-maintainer and member of the Drupal Security Team, and Matt Cheney, of Chapter Three.

They will let us know about the security features build into Drupal, and how the Drupal Security Team works; the best ways to configure your site to avoid common pitfall; and the best practices for developing secure modules.

See you all there,
Tao Starbow

This month we are focusing on Drupal projects going on at UC Berkeley.

Brian Wood, from UCB Computing Operations and Information Systems (COIS), will talk about a Drupal hosting initiative he has been spearheading, and the work he has been doing to integrate Drupal and CAS, the campus single sign-on system.

Matt Cheney, from Chapter Three, will present the work they have been doing for the Townsend Center.

See you all there,
Tao Starbow

I have been hearing a lot of buzz about the Context and Spaces modules. What do they do. I couldn't tell you. Fortunately Dmitri can, and he is the one giving the presentation.

Also, bring your stories about DrupalCon DC to share. We want to hear the latest news, what surprised you, and at least one new thing you learned.

See you all there,
Tao Starbow

This month's topic is Upgrading to Drupal 6.
"The drop is always moving" is a Drupal motto. The upside is constant innovation, the downside is that upgrading Drupal to the next version can take care and effort. This month Debrorah Fuzetto will present a case study on upgrading an existing site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. Derek Wright (dww) will talk about upgrading drupal.org to Drupal 6. And Gowri will give an overview of internationalization features in Drupal 6, and the virtual sprint to get improvements into Drupal 7.

Happy New Years Bay Area Drupalers!

Let's get this year started with a look at Panels2 - it is considered by some to be the best hope to bring a user friendly UI to page layout in Drupal, it is the secret sauce in group.drupal.org, it is amazing flexible and expandable, and it can also make you crossed eyed just trying to figure out how to set it up. Straight from the ever fertile brain of Earl Miles, Panels2 might forever change the way you think about Drupal, if you can just figure out what it does :)