Droplabs

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

This meetup has passed. Our next meetup is on April 25, 2013! See http://groups.drupal.org/node/295838 for details.

End the month with some fun and Drupal at the San Gabriel Valley Drupal Meetup at Intelligentsia Pasadena on Thursday, February 28th, 2013 from 6-8pm! This meetup's focus is on Users Helping Users, which is a chance for members of the community to help and be helped by others with whatever questions and problems they're having with Drupal.

Please note that while Users Helping Users is not designed to be a replacement for bona fide consulting from a Drupal professional that there are plenty of Drupal experts and professionals who attend our meetups and sometimes they need help, too!

Thank You to Our Sponsors!

The raffle prizes for this event are being provided by Exaltation of Larks @LarksLA, a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles.

This event is being organized with help from Droplabs (@Droplabs), a collaborative Drupal event and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles.

Several organizers of the Downtown Los Angeles Drupal group are meeting for the year's first Downtown Drupal Governance Meetup on Wednesday, February 27, 2013 between 5-6pm.

In the spirit and tradition of our user group and events, this meetup is open to all Downtown Drupal members and is an excellent opportunity for anyone who's interested in getting involved or is just interested in observing our open governance model.

Join us in person at Droplabs or remotely via Google+ Hangout!

Agenda

Our agenda for this meeting is to review (and possibly publish) the proposed Downtown LA Drupal Governance policy:

   http://groups.drupal.org/downtown-los-angeles/governance  

If you plan to attend, please be prepared and familiarize yourself with both our group's mission at http://groups.drupal.org/downtown-los-angeles and our current governance proposal at http://groups.drupal.org/downtown-los-angeles/governance prior to this meetup.

Join Us on Google+ and Twitter!

To join the meeting, use the following URL:

   Google+ hangout: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/7378d9b61d65107cb08a67d67ef7e75fd8a2f67d
   Short URL: http://ex.tl/ZMW  

During the meetup, the event organizers will be monitoring Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @DowntownDrupal.

Join us at @Droplabs On February 15, 2013 at @1pm for any & all folks interested in helping volunteer at the Droplabs booth at this year's SCALE. We're providing full conference passes (a $70 value) to those who volunteer several hours of your time (but they'll be available on a first-come basis). So get in while the gettin's good!

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!

The next High Performance Drupal meetup is meeting once again at Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency in Culver City, on February 19, 2013. Those interested in attending this meetup remotely are welcome to join us via WebEx.

At this meetup, we're featuring a presentation on Behat Overview and Real World Examples.

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're soliciting additional presentations and lightning talks for this meetup. If there's a topic that you'd like give a presentation on, please leave a comment 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!

Also see http://groups.drupal.org/node/282243#agenda for details. We'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at 8:00pm.

Thank You to Our Sponsors!

Light food and refreshments will be served throughout the evening courtesy of our food, drink and venue sponsor, Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency. Filter Digital's client list spans global brands and Fortune 100 companies to startups and boutique firms. Let us help you create a digital solution that fits your needs!

Our 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 classroom and coworking space in Downtown Los Angeles. We're quickly gaining a reputation for being the only coworking space around with a with a low-cost business model: come work here and use our tables, chairs, WiFi and conference room with a low, daily or monthly membership fee and only pay more for the extras, such as 24/7 access, equipment rental and a locker for your belongings.

You don't have to work alone. We're happy to take part in yet another Drupal Coworking Friday at Droplabs, a collaborative coworking space, classroom and hackerspace. Join us!

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.