LA Drupal Main Monthly Meetup - May 31, 2011

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rainbreaw's picture
Start: 
2011-05-31 19:00 - 21:30 America/Los_Angeles
Event type: 
User group meeting

Mark your calendars for our LA Drupal meetup: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at the corporate headquarters of Media Temple in Culver City, CA.

Theme for the night: User Interface - Configuring *Friendly* and Client-Scalable Drupal Sites.

The meetup will begin at 7:00pm sharp, but the doors will open at 6:30pm if you want to come early and network or work with a community member on a Drupal related project!

This event is free!
And there will be raffle prizes, food and drink!!!

No RSVP is required, but if you signup you will receive any last minute details, and have our undying gratitude for helping us know how many to expect in order to arrange adequate seating, food, drinks, and so on. So… please sign up by clicking the Sign up button at the bottom of this announcement.

When: Tuesday, May 31, 2011 from 7:00-9:30pm
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)

Parking & Location

There is on-street parking as well as a parking lot on Hayden Ave.

Media Temple is a webhosting and virtualization service provider and has one of the largest virtualization deployments in North America, with more than 85,000 customers and more than 600,000 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.

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.

Agenda

Theme for the Night: User Interface - Configuring *Friendly* and Client-Scalable Drupal Sites.

Presentations:

*1. Node Hierarchy: Using Parent / Child Relationships to Make Client Updates Easier*
Rain Breaw will talk about how node hierarchy, with a small amount of views and block magic, can be used to ensure that your site scales gracefully once it goes into client hands and they begin adding pages willy-nilly! We will look at how this can save you with things like submenus and breadcrumbs as well.

*2. Panels*
Oliver Seldman will then talk about the panels UI, demystifying it and making it accessible. He'll also cover why you may or may not want to use Panels from a site-configuration and client-handoff standpoint (update on this talk coming soon... :)).

*3. Lightening Talks*
We will also open the floor up for **lightening talks** related to our theme after the presentations, so comment below and/or come prepared if you'd like to give one!

If you'd like to give a lightning talk, 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.

Users Helping Users

The meetup begins at 7pm but the doors open a little earlier at 6:30pm 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. It'd be great if you have a lightening talk that fits with the evening's theme!

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 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.

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

Time-depending, at the end of the evening we'll split up into groups (sometimes called BoFs, or birds of a feather) and each group can jump into a particular topic. 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 restaurant or bar for a Drupal After Dark afterward. Leave a comment below if you have ideas of a possible bar or restaurant that is nearby.

Looking Ahead

For next month, if you have an idea for something you'd like to learn, post a comment below, or better yet suggest a presentation idea! ... and if you see a topic you'd like to present, post a comment or contact us! Depending on remaining time, we'll have lightning talks, job announcements, break-out groups, and networking. Oh, and of course raffle prizes!

Comments

New in town. Looking forward

dragonwize's picture

New in town. Looking forward to this.

welcome, dragonwize!

rainbreaw's picture

looking forward to chatting with you -- we talked a while back about the convio api module, and perhaps you being in town might be a good opportunity to see if it's time to get back into it!

Ditto :)

BTMash's picture

Given my (lack of) maintenance with the module, I'll be the one hiding out in the building ;)

I'll be hiding too. I

wizonesolutions's picture

I'll be hiding too. I actually have some enhancements (well, they're probably too scattered/use-case dependent to be generally useful) just sitting around that never got contributed back. But it was an interesting module...if one has access to a Convio system with which to test it.

WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF

View's poor man theming lightning talk

bvirtual's picture

I was wondering if our members might be interested in using View's ability to theme it's cck fields?

Sure, there is individual theming, each one in turn. But there is another way, which I have only seen mentioned once in the last 5 years. So, it leaves me wondering if it's a 'bad' practice, or no one knows about it.

Basics: The view's fields are all 'non displayed' except the last one, which contains span and div tags with class names (or styles) for each of the non displayed fields (and itself). This allows complex nesting, and even repetitive use of a field's value, say one for display, and one inside a link, and even combining values, say as query string parameters.

I've used this method for quick prototyping, avoiding writing an override theme tpl.php file. It's a mouse click and keyboard method available to non programmers, or those without access to the theme folder.

If this method is not recommended for Drupal, then a lightning talk on it would be 'bad'. Thus, I'm asking first. Not for this meeting, but perhaps the next, I would present this.

Peter

LA's Open Source User Group Advocate - Volunteer at DrupalCamp LA and SCALE

interesting question

rainbreaw's picture

Whether good practice or not, I've done this before also when in a bind or not having access to the code base and needing to get something up... please help us remember to bring this up during community Q&A?

I'm considering venturing out

wizonesolutions's picture

I'm considering venturing out and asking a lightning-talk-formatted (time permitting) question based on http://wiz1.us/devenv. I've been refining my ideas and what I want to achieve over the past couple days and should be able to articulate them decently by the time the meetup rolls around.

For those short on time, the link above is to a blog post I made. The basic question is, "How can I switch between online and offline development environments in an hour or less?" Development environment refers to the Web server setup a developer typically uses, online meaning Internet-accessible and offline meaning only locally-accessible, e.g. a virtual machine.

Rob Ristroph from Four Kitchens left a helpful comment on the post, so the discussion is underfoot!

WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF

Oh yeah: Drupal Camp Sacramento Area

wizonesolutions's picture

I'm attending this camp, and so I'd also or alternatively be willing to talk about how it went. It doesn't seem like many (any?) others will be along for the ride with me. But I've got friends in the Bay Area and don't have to worry about hotel expenses, so there you have it.

WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF

Wish I could make it... have

mike stewart's picture

Wish I could make it... have plans that weekend. I'd definitely be interested in an update on the sacramento area camp. for anyone not aware, upcoming events are available at: http://groups.drupal.org/events - you can filter by camps, meetups, training, etc.

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

Lightning Talk

mcfilms's picture

In keeping with the UI/UX theme for the main meetup, I could do a Lightning talk on theming the Ubercart checkout page.

On a recent project for http://skinglowmd.com the client found the shopping cart and checkout page to be rather ugly. I can show what we did to make paying money a somewhat more pleasant experience.

If there's time and interest

mike stewart's picture

If there's time and interest I'd like to give a quick talk on the theming layout with omega theme using delta & context modules to control layout as an alternative to panels

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

That would be great! Drupal

rainbreaw's picture

mcfilms re: ubercart theming: That would be great! Drupal will benefit from more people being comfortable customizing that pesky default checkout page :)

mike stewart re: alternative to panels: bring it on! let's have you talk right after oseldman. oseldman and I had a conversation about panels the other day in which we agreed that, while it is an amazing tool that can open a world of possibilities when used correctly, many times it's used in a context in which it is absolute overkill and therefore bad for the client experience... alternative ways to approach drupal-recipes are always worth knowing more about.

Drupal After Dark

Stew-bee's picture

I personally think that Ugo Bar has a been good place for Drupal After Dark.
But what do you think, any other ideas?

Do not forget that everybody is invited to Drupal After Dark, it is where we continue to talk Drupal at a local restaurant or bar after the meetup.

I'm fine with Ugo, but if you

jstoller's picture

I'm fine with Ugo, but if you want a change of pace I've got suggestions for other places in the same area.

If you want high-class, Bottle Rock, on Main Street, is an excellent wine bar. In addition to their normal pours, they will open any bottle in the house if you agree to buy at least two glasses. Then it goes up on the board for others to order from. They also have an extensive beer menu, which I understand is quite good (if you like beer) and some tasty treats to eat. http://www.bottlerock.net/culvercity/

If you'd rather a nice margarita, then I'd recommend Kay 'n Dave's Cantina, on Culver Blvd. They're a full restaurant with great food and drink. We should probably check the hours first (I didn't see them on the website) and you might want to warn them we're coming. They have a nice patio in back with a fire pit, which we could probably reserve, and would be great for an after dark. http://www.kayndaves.com/pg_find_culver.html

Great meetup!

TommyK's picture

I appreciated the theme of tonight quite a bit. Administrative interface usability is a big passion of mine. No one should have to struggle with getting their work done efficiently. Thanks Rain and Oliver and everyone else who spoke up with tips and comments!

I encourage everyone to check out the session from DrupalCon Chicago 2011 that discussed these issues a bit too: http://chicago2011.drupal.org/sessions/baby-got-backend-content-administrators-are-users-too

Following tonight's

christefano's picture

Following tonight's discussion of Search 404 and Thrifty 404, I found that the Search 404 project logged the commit message:

#784494 by joelstein: Added thrifty mode to allow skipping of auto search on 404

I don't know if this is in the Drupal 7.x version (which I'd looked into not long ago) but at least for for Drupal 6 it appears the "thrifty mode" introduced by Thrifty 404 was in fact included in Search 404.

Search 404 vs. Thrifty 404

JayVGee's picture

Thanks Christafano. So it sounds like 'Search 404' includes exactly what 'Thrifty 404' was designed to do (at least for Drupal 6). Do I have that correct? Do you know or how I can find out if 'Search 404' is still being maintained? If not what is the official status of 'Thrifty 404'?

JayVGee

yes,

mike stewart's picture

yes, http://drupal/project/search404 does everything http://drupal/project/thrifty404 does, plus more.

neither module has been recently "actively" maintained. However search 404 has both more steady commits and more recent commits. and over 17,000 installs (calling home) compared to 63 for thrifty404.

I use it on many of my client sites... search404 is pretty stable. I have also checked the settings box so it works just like thrifty by default.

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

Thanks!

JayVGee's picture

Thanks Mike, I got those same findings. Appreciate the confirmation.

JayVGee

Awesome

anon100101001's picture

Since I have moved out here from Florida, I have always wanted to see the Media Temple headquarters. Awesome!

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Einstei