barnraising

Join us at Droplabs on Friday & Saturday, April 27-28, 2012, for a Barn Raising and Code Sprint to benefit the Echo Park Time Bank and TimeBanks USA!

There's something for everyone at this two-day event and you're welcome to attend either or both days. If you're interested in learning more about the Features module and getting some practical hands-on experience, or if you're a Features power user and would like to help mentor others into using Drupal's best practices for site development, this is an excellent opportunity.

The Echo Park Time Bank is a non-profit community collective with a mission to facilitate the cooperative exchange of goods and services among its hundreds of members. Since September 2011, the Echo Park Time Bank has been using Drupal to manage their community website at http://arroyoseco.timebanks.org and its currency system.

We'll be using the Features module and configuration-in-code methodology to help make feature development, maintenance and updates to their site much easier. The Features that we create will be shared with TimeBanks USA, which will directly benefit the 300+ time banks that have their own sites that use the same Drupal distribution.

A barn raising is an event during which a community comes together to assemble a barn for one or more of its households, particularly in 18th- and 19th-century rural North America. (Wikipedia)

The same can be done for websites.

SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo) is going to be a little earlier next year and this has moved forward the CFP (Call for Papers). We will be building the SCALE site on Drupal 7 this year. In the past, the CFP was on a separate non-Drupal framework and importing the data was the source of some headaches. I hope by bringing the CFP into Drupal from the start, we can improve on that situation.