Online meeting

December 29, 2011 is Leave GoDaddy Day and we're celebrating the occasion with a domain transfer and website migration workshop at Droplabs. You're invited!

What's Leave GoDaddy Day, you say? In simplest terms, we're participating in a global event with thousands of others and are moving GoDaddy-registered domains and GoDaddy-hosted websites to other registrars and webhosts.

This impromptu workshop is being organized by individuals who have done this migration already. If you've been inclined to do the same but wanted a helpful hand, this event is for you. Drop in any time between 11am and 4pm. We'll also be in the #droplabs IRC channel during the workshop and will provide emotional and technical support as needed.

Long Beach: we're bigger than Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Cleavland, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Cincinatti, to name a few. So it's no surprise we've got some great talent in the area. Do you live here or nearby? Do you know Drupal or want to learn? Come join us for a totally free & fun evening of Drupal sharing, learning, networking, and open source goodness: Wednesday, Jan 4, 2012 for our first meetup of 2012 (OMGOMGOMG)!_

MEETUP	INFORMATION
Monthly muse:	Come learn a work-flow that allows you to contribute to Drupal core in 30min or less!
When:	Wednesday, Jan 4, 2012 :: 7:00pm - 10:00pm Doors open between 5p - 6p, come early to help setup & chat. RSVP by clicking sign-up or follow @LADrupal on twitter for details.
Where:	LA NET 4182 N. Viking Way, Suite 214 Long Beach, CA 90808 Note: Enter main entrance on Viking Way, up the stairs and then to the right.
Venue:	Free Parking, Free Wi-Fi, power, etc. Thanks to our generous host: LA Net
Online:	IRC channel: #drupal-la
Agenda:	This is a working meetup. Come teach others to contribute by letting them watch you. Come learn by watching and participating. Post issue suggestions in comments below. At our last meetup, we went through the process and RTBC'd one lingering issue. This meetup we'll split into at least two working groups and hope to RTBC much more.
Raffle:	We'll have prizes at meetups with attendance of 15 (or more). Based on attendance last month, a raffle seems likely. We have coupons and DVD's from the awesome Drupal training people at www.BuildAModule.com -- with over 500 Drupal specific videos available for streaming, download, or on DVD.
Free Food & Drink:	Provided for anyone that RSVP's. Thanks to our sponsor and local Drupal shop:    media done right Also, special thanks to Stauffer New Media Development for co-sponsoring food & drink at the meetup in December!

The next Downtown LA Drupal meetup is on January 17, 2012 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 monthly Downtown LA meetup, the weekly Pro Drupal 7 Development book study group and special events like the LA Drupal job fairs in June and November, 2011.

LA Drupal 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.

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.

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.

We'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at 9:30pm.

Agenda

   6:30pm
   Users Helping Users
   Projector and tables / chairs setup

   7:30pm
   Introductions and job announcements
   News (SCALE 10x, Drupal Design Camp LA, DrupalCon Denver, etc.)
   Community questions and answers

   8:30pm
   Case study on Marketplace.org by Matt Berger, Paul Brent and Abhishek Taneja
   Lightning talks
   Raffle prizes!

   9:30pm
   Wrap-up, Clean-up and Close-up
   Drupal After Dark and networking session

Join members of the Los Angeles Drupal user group in the Drupal community's second code sprint for updating COD (Conference Organizing Distribution) to Drupal 7. This is a joint event produced by LA Drupal's Pro Drupal 7 Development book study group and Droplabs, a Drupal coworking / hackerspace in Downtown Los Angeles.

Join us in person or online!

During the code sprint, we'll be gathered in the #drupal-cod IRC channel and all are welcome to join us. The event organizers and attendees will also be checking Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @UseCOD or use the #CODD7 hashtag.

About COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution

COD is used for building conference and event websites. It's built on Drupal, the highly-regarded open-source web framework and content management system, and each component is independent of each other. This means you can disable the features you don't need, whether it's selling tickets or listing sponsors or allowing session voting.

Just like Drupal, COD is free and can be used by anyone. There is a very long list of sites that use COD, from the DrupalCon Chicago and DrupalCon London conferences to RIACon, Brisbane Innovation Camp, the Meego Conference, the Bay Area Drupal Camp, and our own Drupal Design Camp LA.

Here are just some of the great features in COD:

• Session submission, voting and moderation
• Session schedule grid
• Personalized attendee schedules
• Easy event registration and attendee management
• Community features (forums, friending, etc.)
• Easy sponsors management

We're already using COD on Drupal 6 for the Drupal Design Camp LA 2011 website and we plan to use COD on Drupal 7 for Drupal Design Camp LA 2012. COD is not yet ready for this but we're not afraid of rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty.

Help us improve COD and you'll also be helping numerous Drupal contrib projects, including Location, Signup and Commerce, as well as other organizations and conferences, such as DrupalCon, SCALE 10x and DrupalCamps around the world including our own Drupal Design Camp LA.

COD on Drupal 7 Battleplans

• Find a venue (done! we're meeting at Droplabs)
• Gather interest and sponsorships
• Set up a hosting environment for group collaboration
• Add contributors to our version control system
• Download COD, set up the team with tools, including Quickstart
• Get up to speed on work that has already been done:
  • San Diego COD sprint on May 7, 2011
  • Notes on Lullabot's Etherpad instance at http://lullapad.com/h12fYizetk
  • Upgrading COD to Drupal 7: Sprint 1 - San Diego
  • COD roadmap
  • Porting COD to Drupal 7
  • COD on Drupal 7 How-to
• Debate Commerce vs. Ubercart 3 (just kidding: the COD roadmap lists Commerce)
• Code! Code! Code!
• Update the COD issue queue with current progress
• Write a summary for Planet Drupal to thank our sponsors and contributors, aid any future CODD7 sprints, etc.

Pre-sprint discussion and planning

We've already begun discussing and planning several parts of the code sprint during the first 15 minutes of each Pro Drupal 7 Development book study group meeting. To join the conversation, click the Signup button below, post a comment below, contact any of the event organizers at the top of this page or just drop by the Pro Drupal 7 Development study group some Monday night.

The attendance of the book study group is already capped for this book group cycle but you're more than welcome to drop by, talk with us and work on your projects at Droplabs alongside other Drupaleros.

Hi everyone,

SoftLayer has a new datacenter in San Jose, CA, and I'm moving our VPS (which they call a CCI, or cloud computing instance) that hosts musclebeach.ladrupal.org to it from their Seattle datacenter. I've talked with SoftLayer's support team about this process and everything is planned out and ready to go.

When is this maintenance window?

Save the date! On Friday, May 6, Droplabs is kicking into open beta and throwing what's shaping up to be an extraordinary event, in conjunction with Toyshoppe Systems, another company at Big Art Labs. All of Big Art will turn out, so we thought it would be a great opportunity for the Drupal community to mingle with the Big Art community at the beginning of Drupal's first hacker / co-working space.

It's potluck barbecue, with a great big bonfire, so bring something to throw on the grill, something to drink, and something to munch on. Evenings have been a bit cool, so unless you're super warm blooded, you might find that you need a jacket.

Droplabs' open beta is just that: we're opening up to the community, and not charging until we officially launch in June. We want to give you an opportunity to try it out for free and see how you use it, tell us what you want or don't want, and generally feel free to hang out as much or as little as you want. You know, open beta. Bring your laptop. Show up. Use the space. Interact with your fellow Drupaleros and see how much joy you can bring to your Drupal practice.

We have some furniture, and before we invest in more, we want to see what the needs of the community actually are. (We'll also gladly accept furniture donations.)

This two-hour webinar-based course will introduce you to designing for Drupal. The course is intended for web designers and graphic designers who are beginning to create designs that will be built using the Drupal content management system.

The course will introduce web design concepts and techniques, the Drupal architecture, how to work with web developers and clients and how to create designs that will take advantage of the new Drupal 7, as well as current Drupal 6. No programming experience is assumed or required.

As announced on the Drupal.org front page and at http://drupal.org/node/1121304, Drupal.org will be going down for scheduled maintenance for approximately 20 minutes at 11am local time on April 12, 2011. The official announcement is included below.

SoCal Drupalistas: Join us in the Sheraton Lobby at 12:30pm on Thursday, 3/10 for a GROUP PHOTO!!!

Yes, this is the second group photo - too many people were not in the first one. :)

Interested in giving back to Drupal? We'll be doing it all day in Long Beach.

• Want to learn how?
• Do you already know how and would like to collaborate with others?

Special thanks to our hosts, LA Net, a community-based Practice-Based Research Network (PBRN) focused on health disparities reduction in Southern California.