The next Downtown LA Drupal meetup is on July 19, 2011 and will be at Droplabs, a Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. Created by LA Drupal members for the LA Drupal community, Droplabs is the host of LA Drupal's weekly Pro Drupal 7 Development book study group and special events including last month's Drupal job fair and Varnish 3 Release Party.
LA Drupal meetups follow a basic format and start off with Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, raffle prizes and full-length presentations. We'll also have community Q&A, during which time anyone in attendance can ask questions, divine answers from the crowd and give brief, 5-10 minute-long presentations known as lightning talks. We'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at 9:30pm.
Light food and refreshments will be served throughout the evening courtesy of our food and drink sponsor, Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles.
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!
Presentations
Test-driven development
Learn from Miguel Hernandez (@Techivist) about the SimpleTest unit testing framework and why Drupal 7 is the most stable release of Drupal in its entire history. We'll also learn about how to make your Drupal sites perform better and error-free (e.g. don't miss an e-commerce order because of a new bug!) and how contributed modules on Drupal.org have been catching up on including tests.
How to contribute to a module or theme that's on Drupal.org
There are many ways to contribute to projects on Drupal.org, from improving documentation and submitting patches to writing tests and sponsoring development. Christefano (@christefano), a core contributor to Drupal 5, Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, will demonstrate the Drupal.org ticketing system (known as the "issue queue"), do a live "patch review" during the presentation, and explain how bounties (and reverse bounties) work.
For any changes to our agenda, stay tuned to this meetup announcement or click the Sign up button below (or both!) to be notified when the agenda has been updated.
Location
Droplabs
651 Clover St.
Los Angeles, CA 90031
Droplabs is in the Mission Junction neighborhood of Los Angeles at Big Art Labs, just 1 mile down Main St. from Philippes (the first-ever venue for LA Drupal meetups!) and Union Station. We're one block west of The Brewery, the largest live-and-work artists' colony in the world.
What to bring
Just bring your laptop, your business cards or whatever else you need. We share a large parking lot with Big Art Labs and there's plenty of free parking. After you pull into the parking lot, park to the left of the entrance and follow the signs to Droplabs.
Please note that our guest wireless network is limited to 1Mb per client, so bring your MiFi router or a phone you can tether with if for some reason you need a lot of bandwidth. Access to our high-speed network is included with a Droplabs membership.
To get last-minute updates, follow @Droplabs on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Droplabs or find us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DroplabsLA
About Droplabs
Droplabs is a collaborative Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. Created in 2011 by LA Drupal members for the LA Drupal community, we are focused on serving the greater LA Drupal community, enriching the Drupal skills and lives of its members, and bringing joy to our Drupal practice.
We've been open to the public since May, 2011, and the use of our equipment and facilities, including conference room, tables and chairs, is free until our official launch. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/145934 for more details about our open beta period and http://droplabs.net/prices for our list of free amenities and member perks, including our high-speed WiFi, an espresso machine, printer and scanner services, and more.
Droplabs is the host of the monthly Downtown LA Drupal meetups, LA Drupal's weekly Pro Drupal 7 Development book study group and special events including the Varnish 3 Release Party and LA Drupal's first-ever Drupal job fair. To learn more about Droplabs, follow @Droplabs on Twitter, sign up at Meetup.com/Droplabs or like DroplabsLA on Facebook!
About LA Drupal
LA Drupal is one of the world's largest regional Drupal user groups and is Southern California's largest hub for all things Drupal. In addition to scheduling 4 regular meetups a month and occasional trainings and social gatherings, LA Drupal members produce special events, code sprints, and the annual DrupalCamp LA and Drupal Design Camp LA conferences.
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 to find 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 and find events in our community calendar at http://groups.drupal.org/la/events
Comments
A few presentation proposals
A few presentation proposals for DrupalCamp LA 2011 have been posted at http://groups.drupal.org/node/162669
Would anyone like to practice a run-through of their presentations at this Tuesday's meetup? There are already two presentations lined up for the meetup, but we can always make room for more.
DrupalCamp LA Preview
This is a great idea. If you run short of time, or if you'd like to preview your DrupalCamp LA session, or propose a talk and get feedback, the theme for the westside meetup on July 26 will be previewing DrupalCamp LA talks.
John Romine
Sorry I can't make it this
Sorry I can't make it this time
Sorry to sign up then cancel.
Sorry to sign up then cancel. I had hoped to come early and ask a question. I found the answer to my question already. Thanks for hosting these, and I hope to go to one down the road.
Glad you found the answer you
Glad you found the answer you were looking for! Signing up and cancelling is no problem. Hope to see you at one of the upcoming meetups.
Configuring VIM
At last nights meeting, I gave a brief demo of enhancements you can do to the unix-based text editor, Vi/Vim.
Here is the link on d.org that I referred to:
http://drupal.org/node/29325
This article includes links to the textmate-like enhancements and snippets you can add to Vim. h_hookname VERY cool stuff. :)
Meeting Minutes July 19, 2011
LA Downtown Drupal
Meeting Minutes
July 19, 2011
By Peter Benjamin
Attendees: 26
After some technical difficulties with the projector to laptop ... our venue host, www.Droplabs.net (a coworking space run by 7 of our members as a Drupal space) could use with your left-over VGA and DVI cables and miscellaneous adapters (folding or stacking chairs, too). The meeting started with announcements, lots of Drupal User Group Events.
2011.DrupalCampLA.com
Our BIG, yearly, DrupalCamp LA event is Aug 6 & 7. The site is waiting your registration, and your selection of desired sessions you wish to hear (come back weekly as more will be added every day), and we solicit you to volunteer to be a speaker on the topic of your choice.
This year we are keen on having a super Beginner Track. Visit http://groups.drupal.org/node/162669 and read what may be presented. You may do a talk close to one of those already proposed, as that happens at all Drupal conferences. Tip: Pick the subject you are most comfortable with.
DCLA is a volunteer run event, please volunteer what you can. There are activities the days of the event you can assist with at http://2011.drupalcampla.com/information/volunteers For more on DCLA planning visit our wiki http://groups.drupal.org/node/155229 ESPECIALLY, we need help testing the live features on the website.
Saturday night may be a Drupal private party at nearby Ant Hill Pub. Plan on it. Do not drive that night, but stay at HotelUCI in a 2 bedroom dorm suite for $100.
Upcoming User Meetings' details are at http://groups.drupal.org/la/events In chronological order: OC Drupal July 20, SCALE Barnraising July 23, LA Drupal July 26, Central San Diego July 28, the special LA Drupal Governance July 30, Pasadena August 1, North Country San Diego August 10, and Inland Empire August 11th. And if you like travel, then there is DrupalCon London, Aug 22-26, 2011. Long Beach Meetup - Say what? Monthly? How do I learn more?
www.LAPHP.org is hosting the inventor of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, at www.CoLoft.com July 28 (same night as Central San Diego). A few seats left, so RSVP now.
Two Job Announcements:
Yangyang Cheng provided a RFQ on a full Drupal site that will stream Chinese video. www.OnGreen.com CTO's Mark Richards offered a job for a Drupal performance expert. Please do read below about the Case Study he presented at the end of the meeting. Full job announcement descriptions are at http://groups.drupal.org/la/jobs
Presentations
We had two stand in speakers give great ad hoc presentations along with the scheduled How to Contribute.
Vim Drupal Tab Completion by Patrick Goddard
www.drupal.org/node/29325 contains how to install and run vi or vim with tab completions for some PHP syntax (switch, for, if and more) and Drupal functions starting with h_*, where h will change to the module folder name, and * is the hook function you wish to have tab completed, sometimes 10 lines of logic code, like "h_block_configure tab".
How To Contribute to Theme or Module Issues by Christefano
Getting patches and testing them is good. But there are other Issue Standard Operating Practices, and we got live action and a good laugh on who is Chrisefano. Thanks Grayside. Several Issue pages were visited, entries done on them, for various reasons. Sometimes, a talk is too hard to put into penciled notes, so here are the URLs mentioned. I may have missed one or two. The talk focused on the basics of check in a patch and install a patch.
www.drupal.org/node/1195782 Roadmap for Drupal 7 Version of Deploy Module - sub to issue by posting "sub"
www.drupal.org/node/841044 File Aliases - See Post #9 by nodiac
www.drupal.org/node/896520 Subuser Integration - See Posts 2-4 -Parents controlling children's Drupal User Accounts
www.drupal.org/node/317655 Shared Email - multiple users use the same email
www.drupal.org/node/803746 Building a Drupal site with Git
Drupal Performance Areas Case Study by Mark Richards
True to unconference form, some ad hoc presentations can captivate the audience. Mark held us spell bound till closing. www.OnGreen.com has some awesome Drupal performance needs that include more than out of the box module installs, like multi head web front end, non Drupal tables accessed via a module to move millions of nodes out of Drupal, with it's own search. Software mentioned: APC an op code cache for 40% gain when Apache loads PHP, advagg module aggregates CSS/JS with wisdom. Yes, a job is offered, full time, on location in Santa Monica. Mark got some solid approaches from the attendees, in true unconference giving in all directions.
Meeting Wrap Up
Tidbits that got into my notes but too small for a full sentence. :*)
Elysa cron - cron hooks, not just commands, hourly or monthly - http://drupal.org/project/elysia_cron
Drop Stack for Mac OS X - drag files to 'clipboard' (similar is freeware XShelf)
Deploy Module - stage Drupal content from one site to another - http://drupal.org/project/deploy
Location Module works - geographic locations related to nodes, users, etc http://drupal.org/project/location
After Dark
Droplabs was good for this. Free drinks and alternative beverages. Next time we WILL move outdoors and fire up the bonfire. Seriously! 8 Drupalers hung till midnight discussing the state of our higher educational institutes producing graduates unable to tie their own shoe laces... Ok, it's not that bad, but we all had our stories of the employee who did not work out in their specialty field, to fast cars, Lotus and Porsche were prominent players, DrupalCampLA needs speakers, how children learn best (science proven and disproven methods), and much more.
Errata
My decision to write up LA Minutes needs my decades old note taking habits to include more key info. Please let me know any corrections needed. All mistakes are mine.
Peter
LA's Open Source User Group Advocate - Volunteer at DrupalCamp LA and SCALE
Great summary
Thanks for the great summary, Pete.
John Romine
Drop Stack or XShelf for Ubuntu/Linux Gnome/KDE?
Is there an equivalent for GNOME or KDE? Searching produced a lot of noise.
Peter
LA's Open Source User Group Advocate - Volunteer at DrupalCamp LA and SCALE
Thanks Pat
Thanks, Pat. I got the Drupal 7 snippets working, the ones that are in the php.snippets file but I don't see any source of Drupal 6 snippets that work. If you found something that works, would you post a link here?