Miami, Florida

Synopsis for Broward Drupal Meetup held on April 7th 2010:

We had five people attend the first Broward Meetup.

After initial introductions, three people gave presentations (location has flat screen TV with VGA connection)

Below is a summary of the presentations:
I gave a quick demonstration of Drupal Gardens
Chris presented Drush Make and Drush
Sammy presented Aegir and gave a quick demonstration of Zen theming

Sorry that many of you missed the meeting last night. One topic that we discussed was why Miami has a very small Dupal community and what we can do to encourage designers and developers in Miami to use Drupal.

I am fond of the one idea what we came up with, creating a basic training workshop that we can use to introduce Drupal to designers and developers in the area. Last night a couple ideas were proposed including making a couple different training tracks.

Here is my proposal:

Is anybody interested in volunteering an hour or two of their time to make the Florida DrupalCamp 2010 web site available for other Drupal user groups to clone?

Salim Lakhani from WebEnabled asked me if they could host an empty version of the site for anyone to clone for their own use. In order to do so, someone would have to do the legwork:

• checkout the site's code and obtain a current DB backup
• get the site up-and-running on their local machine

Has anybody put any thought into creating workshops that attract some of the creative artistic graphic design artists in South Florida to Drupal? With the economy what it is, there are a lot of people graduating the Fort Lauderdale Art Institute and not finding work. What would be great is a workshop that focuses on theming and the workflow from .psd design to finished template.

Miami has a lot of style and design energy that would should be channeled into Drupal.

At our Feb. 24th meeting we brought up some ideas for future meetings.

How to set up a development server
Fonts and typography; SIFR vs. Cufon etc.
Open Atrium
Openpublish (Adam Sohn)
Semantic Web / Open Calais project (Vince)
Importing a Wordpress site to Drupal
Using Drush (Vince)
Image Galleries (Claudio)
Choosing a dynamic menus method

Knight News Challenge
Knight Drupal Initiative

With Florida DrupalCamp less than 3 weeks away, I thought now would be a good time to give everyone a quick synopsis of what's going to be going on at the camp.

Registration has been open for over a month and so far, we have a little over 100 people signed up for the camp. The cost to register is $6.11, but if you're a student or work for a non-profit, we'll waive the fee. We have a hard-cap on attendance of 150, so be sure to register before it is too late.

I just wanted all of the Miami Drupal community to be aware of a new organization. http://incubatemiami.com/

The Enterprise Development Corp. of South Florida (EDC) is opening a 12,000-square-foot technology incubator in downtown Miami to nurture startup companies.

The center, called Incubate Miami, will offer discounted rent to young tech companies. The benefit for companies occupying the incubator will be twofold, explained Jane Teague, EDC’s executive director: The rent is cheap and the proximity to other tech companies offers synergistic opportunities.