Droplabs

Droplabs is teaming up with the Varnish Cache community on Thursday, June 16th and we're having a night of fun and collaboration during the worldwide Varnish 3 Release Party!

Modeled after the Drupal 7 Release Parties we had in January here in Los Angeles and around the world, we're celebrating the release of Varnish Cache 3, the first major release since version 2.0 was released in October 2008.

What's Varnish?

Varnish is a threaded HTTP accelerator and reverse proxy that's used extensively by high performance, enterprise Drupal sites. It is part of the Project Mercury community project and is also included with Pantheon and Acquia's Dev Cloud and Managed Cloud offerings.

At the party will be FREE coupon codes good for 3 months of free hosting with Acquia Dev Cloud. Beta codes for Pantheon will be raffled off at the Drupal meetup and job fair on June 21st, also at Droplabs.

What to bring

Big Art Labs, where Droplabs is located, is having a barbeque and party at the same time right outside our doors, and are featuring two unique art installations:

• The Dragon Oven is is a giant metal pizza oven shaped as a dragon. They'll have it onsite - so please bring pizza fixings: dough, sauce, cheese or any toppings you enjoy and we'll have fresh fired pizza. We'll set it up near the firepit.
• The Engine is an incredible 2000lb transportable steel sculpture that houses a rotating 17' screen and features a high-end audio/visual system. It's currently set up in SmashLabs (one our neighbors at Big Art Labs) on the main stage and we're planning on showing some cool animation shorts. Please bring your own if you'd like to screen them.

All of Big Art Labs is welcome at Droplabs and vice versa. We follow the rules and guidelines we inherit from Big Art Labs and we ask that the Varnish 3 Release Party attendees be respectful of our neighbors, bring something to share to throw on the grill and get ready to make your websites fly.

Just bring your laptop, your business cards or whatever else you need. We share a large parking lot with Big Art Labs and there's plenty of free parking. After you pull into the parking lot, park to the left of the entrance and follow the signs to Droplabs.

Please note that our guest wireless network is limited to 1Mb per client, so bring your MiFi router or a phone you can tether with if for some reason you need a lot of bandwidth. Access to our high-speed network is included with a Droplabs membership.

To get last-minute updates, follow @Droplabs on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Droplabs or find us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/DroplabsLA

This event has passed. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/275138 for information about the next job fair on January 28, 2012.

The next Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetup is on June 21, 2011 and will be at Droplabs, a new Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. You are invited for part or all of the 4-hour event, including a Drupal job fair at 6:00pm followed by a meetup with technical presentations, site showcases, open discussions and raffle prizes at 7:30pm.

A few of us at are staying late tomorrow evening at Droplabs to deploy a Drupal site. We'll be working with Git and a DV server at Media Temple and will set up dev, test and live sites. You're invited to attend, participate, ask questions and learn how to make this a highly repeatable process for you and your clients.

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.)

Drupal in a Day is a full day of training on June 20 2011, offered by the Drupal experts at Exaltation of Larks and Chapter Three for just $400.

This introductory workshop will touch upon almost every aspect of the core Drupal framework:

• Discover how to add, edit, and moderate content.
• Learn how to create user accounts and understand Drupal's permissions system.
• See how to set-up menus, and position blocks on a page.
• Create human-readable URLs, and categorize your content using Drupal's taxonomy system.

At the end of this one-day class you'll have a completed Drupal site, which looks and functions a lot like many sites you'll see on the web today.

This three-day workshop teaches you how to create a comprehensive Drupal module. We'll use and explain each of the top ten Drupal hooks, the menu system and the Form API. You’ll learn how to conform to Drupal coding standards. You’ll write secure code by using Drupal’s built-in functions to sanitize data for display.

You’ll learn from the Drupal experts at Exaltation of Larks and Chapter Three the correct way to save and retrieve data, including how to add your own custom database tables. We’ll also practice using theme system from your module. Depending on interest, we’ll show you how to expose your custom data to Views, demonstrate how to create SimpleTests for your module, or teach you the proper way to upgrade your custom database schema.

What you will learn:

• Drupal coding best practices
• Understanding hooks
• Using the Form API
• Saving custom data
• Providing themable output from your module
• Techniques for keeping your site secure

Days

3 days: June 21-23, 2011. This training is from 10am-5pm and begins at 10am sharp.

Prerequisites

At least six months of prior PHP development. Familiarity with Drupal terms such as nodes, blocks, fields and views. Experience with Drupal configuration and contributed modules/themes is necessary for understanding the concepts of module development.

Following the interest shown since the DrupalCamp LA 2010 keynote, the last two LA Drupal meetups and the great discussion at http://groups.drupal.org/node/100049 a group of us are checking out spaces for a coworking / hackerspace. Our first site visit is to Big Art Labs on Wednesday (Groundhog's Day!), February 2, 2011 at 1pm.

While this space will be open to all our friends in the LA Drupal community, this is not an LA Drupal-specific endeavor. If you're interested in a place where creative and technical people gather for a Drupal meetup or Drupal Café every day and the occasional Drupal After Dark at night, then join us and help make this happen!

Big Art Labs is at 651 Clover St., Los Angeles, CA 90031. There's so much parking that we don't know what to do with it all. Sign up below to be on this site visit's mailing list. We'll send you our phone number and any last-minute details if there are any.