Meetup June 2009 - At McDonalds in Apple Valley

The High Desert Drupal group meets the first Wednesday of every month. This local group is a nice place for people to learn and talk about Drupal, a world popular content management system (CMS). We also talk about web development in general, covering all aspects from planning, design, development, and maintaining a web site. RSVP is not required and attendance is free. Tell all your friends!

What are we going to talk about?

LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP (pronounced /ˈɛl dæp/), is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP. --Wikipedia

LDAP is very popular in the enterprise and one of its main uses is to store information about people in an organization. You can think of LDAP as a a central server address book that stores information about a person (i.e. name, address, phone, etc...). You can also store usernames and passwords in an LDAP server. This is great because by using LDAP you can have a single source server for authenticating clients. If you think of a college campus, you can sit down at any computer on campus and use the same username and password to login to any computer. An account was not created on every computer on campus, the authentication is actually handled by a central LDAP server, and not the local machine.

This month we have the privilege of hearing local college professor, Paul Tonning, give a presentation on LDAP and how you can integrate it in your Drupal site. Paul will give us a brief overview of what LDAP is, the different implementations that you can use for a server, and then finally how to integrate your Drupal authentication and account creation using the LDAP Integration module.

Community Time / Lightning Talks

After Paul's presentation we'll open up the floor to the community where anyone can talk about a Drupal module(s) that was a diamond in the rough. Did you come across something in Drupal that you just thought was awesome, and want to share this knowledge with the group? Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

What problem were you trying to solve?
Did you find a module to solve this problem?
How did you find the module?
Did you write a module?
Did you have any FormAPI epiphanies? nodeapi?
Did you do something cool with Views and CCK?

Please spend some time over the next week to think about what you want to share at the group.

Where are we meeting?

We are meeting in the McDonalds conference room at the Apple Valley McDonalds on the corner of Apple Valley Rd and Bear Valley Rd. The room seats up to 49 people and is free to use.

If you plan on attending, sign up for an account on this site and then click the "Sign Up" button below to let us know you're coming. You DO NOT have to sign up on this site to attend, you can just show up. If you do sign up, you'll be emailed a reminder for the meeting on one day before the meeting.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions.