North County San Diego DUG

So, what do you guys think of having a combined meetup for our last hurrah of the year? We can push the North County meetup later by a week and pull the Downtown meetup back by a week.

Let's meet at a brewhouse or something too. Change things up a little?

Got no responses to this idea, so we're going to go ahead and have the meetup tonight at NAMM. We can still plan for a combined meetup next week though...

Hey Everyone,

We need to get the site ready to go for registration and sponsorships. Can you help us out this Sunday?

We're excited to announce our next Frontend Drupal meetup! This time we're meeting at Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency in Culver City, on the 5th Tuesday of the month between 7-9pm on October 30, 2012. This meetup focuses on design, usability, accessibility and theming, and as part of the Design 4 Drupal movement is about inviting the larger design community to become a part of the Drupal community.

Our meetups follow a basic format and start off with Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, raffle prizes and full-length presentations. As always, 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 9:00pm.

What is Drupal? For large and complex websites, nothing beats it! Where do you start? What is the best way to organize your project to get the best chance of success? This workshop will help you turn your ideas into a concrete todo list — whether you're building the site yourself, handing it off to a developer to build, or something in-between.

This is the perfect workshop for you if:

• You're new to using Drupal and need a jumpstart in planning a large project
• You're investigating Drupal's viability for your next project
• You're wondering whether to invest time in learning Drupal
• You don't have the time to learn Drupal but will be involved in a Drupal project

Seating is limited. You'll have access to the experts at Exaltation of Larks — a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company in Los Angeles — learn about Drupal and have a fun day! Sign up now at http://www.larks.la/training  

This is our last Introduction to Drupal workshop for the year. Don't miss it!

Join us on November 16, 2012 in Downtown Los Angeles for Drupal Development Best Practices, a full day of Drupal training! This training is being produced by Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, development, consulting and training firm with a team of experts in Los Angeles.

This one-day workshop gives you a comprehensive tutorial on the right way to manage your Drupal website. You'll learn about version control for your code and ways to manage changes in your data. You’ll also see how the Features module can enable you to keep your configuration changes in version control.

We'll cover industry-approved deployment strategies that let you move smoothly through development, testing and live environments. You’ll get a high-level overview of how to modify the way your site looks by sub-theming, preventing hours of frustration should your original theme be updated.

What you will learn:

• Using version control with Drupal
• Maintaining development, testing and production environments
• Managing configuration changes using the Features module
• Creating a basic sub-theme
• Creating a basic module
• Understanding Drupal’s API and the hook system

The next general Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetup is on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 and will be at Sensis Agency in Downtown Los Angeles. Those interested in attending this meetup remotely are welcome to join us via WebEx.

At this meetup, we're having our usual news and announcements, raffle prizes, lightning talks (which are short, bite-sized presentations) and featured presentations.

Drupal and Youth at Urban Txt

Urban TxT (Urban Teens Exploring Technology) is an organization in Downtown Los Angeles that encourages inner city teen males to become catalysts of change in urban communities.

We'll be hearing from Oscar Menjibar (@menjibar) and youth members at Urban TxT about how they learned about Drupal during a technology summer program and then used Drupal to tell their story!

Drupal Security Best Practices

It's been a while since the Los Angeles area has had a talk on Drupal Security, so we'll be focusing on this important subject at this meetup. Christefano Reyes (@christefano) from Exaltation of Larks (@LarksLA) will present on today's security-related best practices for Drupal. The following topics will be covered:

• Common attacks to protect against
• How the Drupal project's security team works
• A security checklist anyone can use
• My site's been hacked! Now what?
• Available security tools, documentation and training materials

Join us at Droplabs for a BuildaModule.com mentored training. This training is from 10am to 2pm on Friday Oct 12th.

If you're planning to attend, please signup for the camp event at ddcla.org and pick the training as a session (or signup to this event below). We'd like to connect with you in advance to know you're coming, as space may be limited.

This training will be focused on Site Building. Please bring a wifi enabled computer that you can use to connect to the internet and watch videos on (and a set of headphones).

The next general Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetup is on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 and will be at Sensis Agency in Downtown Los Angeles. Those interested in attending this meetup remotely are welcome to join us via WebEx.

At this meetup, we're having our usual news and announcements, raffle prizes, a series of lightning talks, which are short, bite-sized presentations, and a featured presentation by Chris Shattuck (@Chris_Shattuck) on how Drupal is used at Build a Module.com, a video subscription website with nearly 800 videos on Drupal development, theming and site building.

Read the discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/260843#comments to see which presentation ideas are being discussed, or join the discussion and post your offers and requests for presentations!

Thank You to Our Sponsors!

Our venue and drinks sponsor is Sensis (@SensisAgency), a cross-cultural advertising agency with digital at its core. We got our start building websites and have expanded into a full service advertising agency, helping our clients take advantage of the fundamental changes taking place in the marketing world.

Our parking, video conferencing and raffle prize sponsor for this event is Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles. We create fun websites, mobile apps, virtual worlds and e-commerce sites. Follow us at @LarksLA to learn more about our Drupal services and upcoming trainings.

This event is being organized with help from Droplabs (@Droplabs), a collaborative Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. We're quickly gaining a reputation for being the only free coworking space around with a freemium business model: come work here for free and only pay for the extras, such as 24/7 access, equipment rental and a locker for your belongings.