Droplabs

We had such a great time at last week's Drupal Sprint Weekend that we're doing it again. Join us at Droplabs on Saturday, March 19, 2013, for another day of Drupal, patch reviews and sprints / hackathons on your favorite Drupal projects.

Those interested in attending this event remotely are welcome to join us via a Google+ Hangout. The hangout URL will be posted soon.

Afterward, we'll be going out for a Drupal After Dark with the teams that built the robots for Robot Combat League, the robot exosuit combat show on the Syfy network. Yeah, a day of Drupal and robots!

What's a "code sprint"?

Code sprints are organized events where attendees meet online or in person (and sometimes both) and work toward a shared goal.

Local area organizers have produced several code sprints in recent history, including sprints focused on building the SCALE conference website, resolving issues in the Drupal 7 issue queue and updating the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) project to Drupal 7.

See https://drupal.org/node/247982 for more information.

What's the code sprint about?

Good question! There will be 3 separate themes at this event:

• Bring in your Drupal projects and cowork with other Drupal community members! This is great opportunity to cowork with others in a low-key environment where anyone in attendance can ask questions and both offer and receive help on their personal and community projects.
• Members of the Greater Los Angeles Area Drupal Camp (GLADCamp) organizing team will be working on the GLADCamp website, adding features, fixing bugs, and adding content about the conference, including sponsorship levels, hotel information, and local attractions;
• Droplabs will also provide a FREE mentored Drupal training using Build a Module videos focusing on Advanced Site Building. Just bring your laptop and a pair of headphones. A Droplabs staff member will set up you with a day pass.

We're excited to announce the next Frontend Drupal Meetup, a meetup focusing on design, usability, accessibility and theming. This month, we're meeting again at Media Temple in Culver City, CA, between 7-9pm on Tuesday, March 19, 2013. Those interested in attending this event remotely can join us via WebEx.

GLADCamp.org Case Study

At this meetup, Sebastian Chedal (@fountainwire) will highlight some of the development tips and techniques used to produce the theme for this year's Greater Los Angeles Area Drupal Camp website at GLADCamp.org.

Sebastian will delve into design, programming and mobile/tablet considerations. The session will cover conditional stylesheets, JavaScript, patching, contributed modules, some PHP and how to override the output of a particular image style with a custom module.

From Fixed to Responsive

Mario Hernandez (@designsdrive) is a Front-End Web Developer and Lead Designer for The U.S. District Court Central District of California, the largest Federal Court in the United States. In 2012, Mario lead the design and development of the Court's public-facing website which is powered by Drupal.

Using a theme provided by the Administrative Office in DC as a starting point, the website was transformed into a responsive website making the first of its kind for a Federal Court. In this session, Mario will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented during this project and will describe the various techniques used to turned a fixed-width theme into a responsive theme.

We're soliciting additional presentations for this meetup. If there's a topic that you'd like give a presentation on, please leave a comment in the comments below. Likewise, if there's a topic that you'd like to learn more about, you're welcome to make a request in the comments below. Thank you!

Are you an entrepreneur, freelancer or remote worker? You don't have to work alone. Join us for another Drupal Coworking Friday at Droplabs, a collaborative coworking space, classroom and hackerspace!

We're in Downtown Los Angeles and are happy to host members of our local community and anyone who is just passing through for some coworking, networking and collaboration. We'll be offering the following FREE services to help rock your workday:

• Free parking on Clover St. and N. Main St. and in our large parking lot;
• Free, metered WiFi;
• Desks, chairs and Ergotron mobile workstations in our open coworking room (on a first-come, first-served basis);
• Hundreds of square feet of whiteboard space;
• Use of our private conference room (unless previously reserved);
• Access to our shared lounge area (unless previously reserved);
• Heat / air conditioning.

Droplabs is supported by memberships, donations, sponsorship of our events, venue rental and paid upgrades, including high-speed, unmetered WiFi, access to a full kitchen (with stove, oven, fridges, sinks, etc.), equipment rental, locker space for your belongings and unlimited coffee, tea, filtered water, sodas and espresso.

Droplabs is happy to host Drupal Sprint Weekend: Los Angeles on Saturday and Sunday, March 9 & 10, 2013. On Saturday, coffee and pastries are being sponsored by Exaltation of Larks and lunch will be provided by Princess Cruises.

This event is taking place simultaneously across the globe. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/277768 for a list of other Drupal Sprint Weekend themes and locations around the world.

Those interested in attending this meetup remotely are welcome to join us via a Google+ Hangout.

What's a "code sprint"?

Code sprints are organized events where attendees meet online or in person (and sometimes both) and work toward a shared goal.

Local area organizers have produced several code sprints in recent history, including sprints focused on building the SCALE conference website, resolving issues in the Drupal 7 issue queue and updating the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) project to Drupal 7.

See https://drupal.org/node/247982 for more information.

What's this code sprint about?

Good question! There will be 4 separate themes at this event:

• The Droplabs Operations Management Group (OMG) is hosting a code sprint for advancing Otto, a Drupal-based coworking space management system, towards its first public release;
• Jen Lampton, who ran the Twig code sprint at Drupal Design Camp LA (the last code sprint before Twig was committed to Drupal core!), has asked Droplabs to be a remote location for Twig Sprint. Droplabs is providing a venue and resources for anyone who's interested in participating;
• Members of the Greater Los Angeles Area Drupal Camp (GLADCamp) organizing team will be working on the GLADCamp website and adding content about the conference, including sponsorship levels, hotel information, and local attractions;
• Droplabs will also provide a FREE mentored Drupal training using Build a Module videos. Just bring your laptop and a pair of headphones. A Droplabs staff member will set up you with a day pass.

We're following up on Sunday with a virtual sprint. Below is the IRC channel and Google+ Hangout information:

   IRC: #gladcamp on freenode
   Google+ Hangout: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/4a4d7c5f754a472fe50db4e09bd1d23330f69387
   Short URL: http://ex.tl/ZM8  

There will be a sprint on the new theme system in Drupal 8. We have a lot of core patches that need to be reviewed and rerolled, and we could use all the help we can get!

Check out this awesome page Joel made for how to prepare and what do do day-of:
http://pittet.ca/drupal/sprint/2013-03-09

meet up in person

Southern CA (Sat, March 9th only) w/ steveoliver
Location still TBD!
If anyone has any office space in North County San Diego to share, that would be great!
please contact steveoliver

We've planned a second site visit to University of Southern California (USC) on February 15, 2013, at 3pm, to catalog and photodocument the spaces reserved for us and the Greater Los Angeles Area Drupal Camp (GLADCamp) that we're planning on April 26, 27 & 28, 2013. In the tradition of several other site visits that we've gone on, this visit is open to everyone and is an excellent opportunity for anyone who's interested in starting to help organize this event.

Sign up at http://groups.drupal.org/node/282568#signup or post a comment at http://groups.drupal.org/node/282568#comments if you're interested in joining us as we tour the facilities. Those who sign up will be on this site visit's mailing list. We'll also send you our phone number and any last-minute details if there are any.

What to Bring

Bring a camera if you have one. This is a walking tour and bringing a laptop, power cables, etc. is not necessary.

Join us at Droplabs for a Build a Module.com mentored training. This training is from 12-3pm. Bring your laptop, your lunch and learn Drupal!

Please bring a WiFi-enabled computer that you can use to connect to the internet and watch videos on (and a set of headphones). Those without headphones can buy or rent headphones from the venue.

    Sign up today at http://www.larks.la/training  

The entire Build a Module.com library is available during our mentored Drupal training, and this time we will be focusing on the Advanced Site Building series:

   http://buildamodule.com/video/advanced-site-building-in-drupal-7-welcome...  

Here is a description of Advanced Site Building:

Welcome to the "Advanced Site Building" collection. In this series, we're going to be covering many of Drupal's most powerful modules for laying out and displaying information on a site. The tools you'll be learning are ones that you'll find yourself using on nearly every Drupal project. We'll be exploring how to build complicated displays of content with the Views module.

How to lay out pieces of a page using Panels, Display Suite and Context. We'll explore how to import content using the Feeds module and how to create and modify a slideshow with the Views Slideshow module. We'll also look at displaying and manage content on a site as well as how to protect our site from the inevitable spam we'll get.

We'll dive into which modules are helpful for speeding up the administration of your site, but most importantly, we're going to explore how all of these pieces fit together; where these modules overlap in functionality, and how to decide which tools are right for which context. There's a lot of modules out there, and figuring out which ones are right for a particular job is hard. And if you start with the wrong tools, you could find it time consuming and frustrating to change gears later on.

So, this collection of videos will speed you through the process of how to pick the right tools and will expose you to ways of thinking about these tools that will really pay off in the long run. If you already have a little experience with Drupal, or have watched the "Build Your First Drupal 7 Web Site" collection, you'll already know what you need to in order to start with these videos. If you don't have that experience, you may find that we gloss over some basic Drupal concepts.

Pricing

Suggested donation: $20.

No one will be turned away from this workshop. If you are unable to donate to Droplabs we ask that you volunteer some time helping Droplabs run more smoothly when you drop by and cowork.

Classroom space is limited, so please sign up early.

About Mentored Training

What's the difference between this mentored training and the 3-hour lunch-and-learn Introduction to Drupal Workshop that we're offering next door at the same time?

In short, the 3-hour introductory workshop is better suited toward business owners and project managers. This mentored training is geared for folks who are interested in diving deeper into Drupal's systems and APIs, module or theme development or using popular contributed modules (e.g. Views, Rules, Features, etc.) for site building.

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.

    Sign up today at http://www.larks.la/training  

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!

Several of the organizers of Greater Los Angeles Area Drupal Camp (GLADCamp) have scheduled a planning meeting and scrum tonight, February 11, 2013 between 7-8pm Pacific (10-11pm Eastern). Anyone who's interested in being part of the organizing effort or is just interested in seeing how this conference is coming together is welcome to join us!