Lucky 7th Drupal meetup in Santa Barbara on July 7, 2010

The 7th Santa Barbara Drupal meetup is on Wednesday, July 7, 2010, at 7pm. That's right, our 7th meetup is on 7/7 at 7! We're meeting at the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara. As always, just bring your laptop and whatever else you need.

This event is free and no RSVP is required, but if you plan to attend please sign up by logging in and clicking the Sign up button below. Knowing how many people are interested in attending can help us better select good locations in the future. People who sign up will also have last minute details (if there are any) sent to them before the meeting. Additionally, you can follow Santa Barbara Drupal on Twitter:

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Our meetings in Santa Barbara have been hosted at a variety of locations, including the Java Station coffeeshop, the Las Cumbres Observatory and the Marine Science Institute and Davidson Library departments at UCSB. We're very grateful to our past and present venue sponors and are always interested in hearing from venue sponsors for future meetups.

If you'd like to host a future meetup, please post a discussion in our group or contact @sbdrupal on Twitter.

Location

The UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute is hosting us this month. We'll be meeting in the Marine Science Building in the 2nd floor conference room (Rm 2318) right off of the balcony. You can reach it from the stairs in the courtyard or the elevators.

Directions to the UCSB campus

Traveling north on 101, take the Airport/UCSB exit (Highway 217) off of 101 approximately eight miles north of Santa Barbara to the campus East Gate.

Traveling south on 101, take the Storke Road/Glen Annie Road exit off of 101 approximately twelve miles north of Santa Barbara. Turn right on Storke Road and proceed two miles to El Colegio Road. Turn left on El Colegio Road and proceed to the campus West Gate entrance.

Parking

Options for parking include paid parking on campus, the Goleta Beach parking lot and on-street parking in Isla Vista. If parking on campus, please be sure to get a permit from an automated dispenser (it's just $3 after 5pm). See the map for more detailed information.

Topics

We'll have the use of a conference room with a projector this time and have a great opportunity to have longer presentations. If you'd like to present on a topic, give a lightning talk or just ask questions of the group, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Features presentation

Adam Ross, one of Santa Barbara's finest, will give a presentation on Open Atrium and, in particular, Features. The Features module provides a powerful, user- and developer-friendly way to export components from a Drupal site (e.g. views, CCK fields, contexts, etc.) for installation on another Drupal site. In other words, all the files and assorted settings are bundled up into a "feature" (much like a module) that can be installed on another Drupal site with the click of a button.

For end-users, Features makes it possible to download and install new features on their sites that would normally require following instructions (or "site recipes"), such as setting up a Yahoo Answers clone within Open Atrium or configuring a WYSIWYG implementation.

For developers, Features represents a best practice approach for putting configuration in code, making deployments from dev to staging to production relatively painless.

Open discussion

Everybody has a favorite module or two and we'll have a round table discussion where everyone will have a chance to share modules they like, they've written or have used to get out of a sticky situation. It's okay if you don't have any favorite modules -- if you want to, you're welcome to ask the group if a module exists that might help with a use case or problem that you're working on.

The only rule at the round table is that you can't repeat a module that someone else has already mentioned.

At the end of the meetup, the list of modules and the links to download them will be posted in the comments below for the benefit of the larger community.