Downtown LA Drupal meetup at Droplabs on August 16, 2011

The next Downtown LA Drupal meetup is on August 16, 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 the Varnish 3 Release Party and LA Drupal's first-ever Drupal job fair.

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 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!

Presentations

AJAX and CCK

Steve Rifkin (@steverifkin) will demonstrate the use of the Ajax module and define a plugin to use with its API for both the module (PHP) and the Javascript API. First, he'll demonstrate ajaxifying individual fields on a node that can be edited inline and then will show he did it.

If you've wished for inline editing on your Drupal website, this demonstration will be a good stepping stone for you.

Remote Web APIs with Services 3.x

Blake Senftner (@bsenftner) will give a talk describing his dual Services 3.x setup for a remote web API on a Rackspace Cloud server and an Ubercart site set up at Hostgator.

This system sells on-demand custom products created by the Rackspace servers at one end of the web API. The online store is a 3D animation element store and the web service is auto-generated 3D head models of YOU for animating within Maya.

Drupal front-end, custom and cloud servers, RESTful web services, real-time 3D rendering, neural nets, mad ambition all in the soup for this talk.

Using Virtualmin: Managing unlimited Drupal sites with your own VPS

Christefano (@christefano) demonstrates how to take your Drupal sites to the next level with the free, open-source Webmin control panel and its powerful Virtualmin plug-in. Add as many features as you want, including unlimited domains, mail accounts, Subversion and Git repositories, mailing lists, and more with a point-and-click web interface.

Webmin and Virtualmin are similar to cPanel and WHM, respectively, and can manage dozens or even hundreds of domains. They are the perfect tools for creating test and development sites, hosting client websites or even managing a full-blown online infrastructure for running a business.

Did we forget to mention, Webmin and Virtualmin are free* and open-source? Compared to site licensing costs of cPanel, WHM, Plesk and other proprietary control panels, Webmin and Virtualmin cost only as much as a basic $10-20/month VPS account.

_{* There is a commercially supported version of Virtualmin, but this not a sales-oriented presentation and Virtualmin Pro will not necessarily be covered in this session. There is a Virtualmin referral program and any referrals from this session directly benefit LA Drupal and not the presenters.}

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.

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