Our next LA Drupal meetup on the Westside is on November 30, 2010 at the corporate headquarters of at Media Temple in Culver City, CA. The meetup begins at 7:30pm but the doors open a little earlier at 7pm 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. Several of us may be going to a local bar or restaurant after the meetup for a Drupal After Dark.
If you'd like to give a presentation, announce a job position or ask any questions of the group, please leave a comment below and plan to come a few minutes early. If presenting, be sure to bring your laptop (and power and display cables) and whatever else you need.
This event is free – in fact, there will be raffle prizes and food and drinks will be provided – and no RSVP is required. Those who sign up, however, will have last-minute details (if there are any) sent to them before the meeting. It's also good to know how many to expect so that we can arrange adequate seating, food, drinks, and so on, so please sign up by logging in and clicking the Sign up button below.
| When: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 from 7:30-9:30pm |
| Where: Media Temple in Culver City, CA at 8520 National Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232 (park on the side street, enter the corner building to suite 101) |
We want your feedback!
During the meetup, we'll be gathered in the #drupal-la IRC channel and all are welcome to join us. The event organizers will also be checking Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @ladrupal or use the #ladrupal hashtag.
Location
We are meeting at Media Temple's corporate headquarters at 8520 National Blvd. in Culver City, CA. There is on-street parking as well as a parking lot on Hayden Ave, but the street parking is closest to the venue. To find the meeting space, first park and then enter Building C (the corner building; suite 101). If you enter Building A you will be led by a Media Temple employee to Building C, where the meeting is being held.
(mt) Media Temple is a webhosting and virtualization service provider and has one of the largest virtualization deployments in North America, with more than 95,000 customers and more than 800,000 domains on both coasts of the United States. Media Temple is a new venue sponsor for us but was one of our gold level sponsors at DrupalCamp LA 2010.
Agenda
Users Helping Users
The meetup begins at 7:30pm but the doors open a little earlier at 7pm 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!
Job announcements and open Q&A
Everyone has a problem every now and then and the open Q&A session is a chance for attendees to divine answers from the collective wisdom of the group. This is also an opportunity for local businesses to make job announcements and ask for referrals and recommendations.
Presentations
- Health Insurance for Freelancers: Los Angeles has a healthy freelance culture, as does the LA Drupal community. As part of LA Drupal's initiative to explore health insurance for its members, Chad Spaide from BenefitSource will be presenting the options that are currently available to our group's freelancers, independent contractors and sole proprietors.
- Introduction to Pantheon: Pantheon is a Drupal hosting service from our friends at Chapter Three. This new service has the usual stack of Drupal, Apache, MySQL and PHP but comes with extra high-performance goodness like Pressflow, Memcache, Varnish and Solr. If that weren't enough, Pantheon accounts have a complete environment where code and databases can be moved up and down from dev, test and production.
Sound complicated? LA Drupal co-manager Christefano will demonstrate that it actually isn't, because all this functionality is managed with a pleasant point-and-click interface.
Pantheon just went into private beta and we have an invite code to give away to a lucky winner at our regular raffle drawing.
- Administering Drupal On-The-Go: LA Drupal co-manager Rain Breaw recently traveled across country with only her iPad and iPhone, while having to manage a couple of active Drupal sites. In this brief presentation, she will show some of the awesome tools and modules that made this easy to do without ever having to hunt down a computer!
Lightning talks
We have time as well for lightning talks, which are 5-10 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.
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 done for the past few months now, 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.
Wrap up and Drupal After Dark
Several of us may be going to a local bar or restaurant for a Drupal After Dark afterward. Leave a comment below if you have ideas of a possible bar or restaurant that is nearby.
About LA Drupal
The LA Drupal community in and around Los Angeles, California, is one of the world's largest regional Drupal user groups. With regular Drupal trainings, monthly meetings and social gatherings, LA Drupal is Southern California's largest hub for all things Drupal. LA Drupal is also the producer of the annual DrupalCamp LA conference, the largest independent Drupal event in the world for three years running, and Drupal Design Camp LA, a design-oriented conference on February 5-6, 2011.
Attending LA Drupal events is one of the best ways to meet and talk with other Drupaleros and we encourage you to attend as many meetings and special events as you can, including the LA Drupal meetups in Santa Monica and on the Westside. 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.
If you aren't already part of LA Drupal, it's easy to become a member. We have several meetings every month that are free and open to everyone. There are also social gatherings and formal working meetings that sometimes happen throughout the month. Events are announced at http://groups.drupal.org/la/events
Comments
During the Users Helping Users
During the Users Helping Users part of the evening, would any newcomers like to see how to install Drupal or move a Drupal site from one server to another?
Also, does anyone have requests for what the breakout groups ought to be this time? I've heard from two people so far that they'd like to learn more about Ubercart.
We updated the agenda recently, and one thing I'd like to add is that we'll also have a report on last weekend's Drupal Everywhere: Making Mobile Websites with Drupal event. This was our first event at the Spring Arts Tower in Downtown Los Angeles and it was a great pilot for our Drupal Design Camp LA conference next year.
Ubercart
+1 for Ubercart
John Romine
Yes, Ubercart would be great!
Yes, Ubercart would be great!
Wowsers, this is a popular
Wowsers, this is a popular topic. Sounds like we're doing an Ubercart breakout session on the 30th!
Is there anyone who'd like to give a longer Ubercart presentation at a future meetup?
Interest Here
I would be interested in giving a longer discussion. I am out of town for the West Side meetup (and Pasadena), but would certainly be interested in throwing in my hat on this. I am currently finishing a project that is heavily leveraging Ubercart core, recurring payments, and role based permissions. I am in the process of writing a module that allows discounts based on volume licenses for corporate access to content and it may prove to be an interesting case study. If anyone has interest in this please let me know and I can put something together for a meetup in the new year.
Automating Discount will be great!
Hi Steve,
I have been using a modified version of UC_Discount Alt and for the most part it covers all the needs. There is however a few things that I would love to be able to do. Giving a discount a start date and time, add to cart free items if a condition is met, etc. Also, a way to create custom triggers for Ubercart will a great topic.
I haven't used triggers with
I haven't used triggers with Ubercart all that much, but I have used Rules. As far a start time goes, if you are comfortable with the Form API you can use . Create your own module, alter the form and schema of the discounts table (hook_form_alter, hook_form_schema), then write the validation and form callbacks for those form elements.
Once those are in place you can write the functions that say whether or not the discount is valid based on the time. I know the Discount Alt module already has an end date so you should be able to copy and modify a portion of the those functions that call those fields and put it into your module and make them specific for a start AND end time. You would then need to change the Discount Alt modules callbacks to use your functions rather than the ones that it comes with.
This concept is also interesting enough to alter the original module and patch it back to the community.
I may get into this in the latter half of this project this month and if I am invited to talk about that, I will include it as part of the presentation.
Jumping into the new
I like jumping into new territory! I have done very little and basic module work but I'll give this one a go.
I am all for your presentation if my vote counts...
Thanks!
Pantheon presentation followup
As always, if anyone has additional questions about the presentation, feel free to reply to this comment.
Here are the relevant links for the things I talked about:
Linode has a Pantheon Mercury StackScript for setting up the stack used by Pantheon. There's an Amazon AMI, too, which you can find by reading the original Project Mercury announcement.
Finally, the reason I wasn't able to log into the Pantheon server via SSH was because my username is the same as my Pantheon account (christefano) and I was mistakenly trying to use my short username (christo).
Administering Drupal On-The-Go Screencast
The full-size screencast of Administering Drupal On-The-Go is now available at http://goo.gl/ky34q.
Other formats (mp3, mp4, iPod) can also be downloaded from http://replay.uci.edu/clients/drupal.
John Romine
Insurance
I was particularly interested in the health insurance options discussion, but wasn't able to attend due to a cold (oh, the irony!). Are there any followup notes or materials I could look at?
The entire meetup was
The entire meetup was videorecorded, so there is a video out there somewhere. I'll check on the status of that.