20 miles+ from High Desert

We're excited to announce our next Frontend Drupal meetup! This time we're meeting at Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency in Culver City, on the 5th Tuesday of the month between 7-9pm on October 30, 2012. This meetup focuses on design, usability, accessibility and theming, and as part of the Design 4 Drupal movement is about inviting the larger design community to become a part of the Drupal community.

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'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at 9:00pm.

You don't have to work alone. We're happy to take part in yet another Drupal Coworking Friday, a free coworking day at Droplabs, your FREE coworking and hackerspace in Downtown Los Angeles. Join us!

Drupal Coworking Friday is a worldwide event spurred in part by the DrupalEasy Podcast #65, which featured Droplabs.

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 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.

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.

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! Sign up now at http://www.larks.la/training  

This is our last Introduction to Drupal workshop for the year. Don't miss it!

Join us on November 14 & 15, 2012 in Downtown Los Angeles for Drupal 7 Layout & Theming, two full days of Drupal training! This training is being produced by Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, development, consulting and training firm with a team of experts in Los Angeles.

Join us on November 16, 2012 in Downtown Los Angeles for Drupal Development Best Practices, a full day of Drupal training! This training is being produced by Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, development, consulting and training firm with a team of experts in Los Angeles.

This one-day workshop gives you a comprehensive tutorial on the right way to manage your Drupal website. You'll learn about version control for your code and ways to manage changes in your data. You’ll also see how the Features module can enable you to keep your configuration changes in version control.

We'll cover industry-approved deployment strategies that let you move smoothly through development, testing and live environments. You’ll get a high-level overview of how to modify the way your site looks by sub-theming, preventing hours of frustration should your original theme be updated.

What you will learn:

• Using version control with Drupal
• Maintaining development, testing and production environments
• Managing configuration changes using the Features module
• Creating a basic sub-theme
• Creating a basic module
• Understanding Drupal’s API and the hook system

Join us on November 12 & 13, 2012 in Downtown Los Angeles for Site Building with Drupal, two full days of Drupal training! Learn by doing at this hands-on, exercise-based training from Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, development, consulting and training firm with a team of experts in Los Angeles.

In two days, you will be brought up to speed on Drupal and be ready to tackle their own project. Learn how to manage media, build calendars and complex, dynamic queries of content by selecting and configuring the most popular modules.

This course is suitable both for Drupal users who are new to Drupal and those who want to broaden their Drupal skills. You'll also review Drupal's block system and learn how to use taxonomy to categorize your content.

The next general Downtown Los Angeles Drupal meetup is on Tuesday, November 20, 2012 and will be at Sensis Agency in Downtown Los Angeles. Those interested in attending this meetup remotely are welcome to join us via WebEx.

At this meetup, we're having our usual news and announcements, raffle prizes, lightning talks (which are short, bite-sized presentations) and featured presentations.

Drupal and Youth at Urban Txt

Urban TxT (Urban Teens Exploring Technology) is an organization in Downtown Los Angeles that encourages inner city teen males to become catalysts of change in urban communities.

We'll be hearing from Oscar Menjibar (@menjibar) and youth members at Urban TxT about how they learned about Drupal during a technology summer program and then used Drupal to tell their story!

Drupal Security Best Practices

It's been a while since the Los Angeles area has had a talk on Drupal Security, so we'll be focusing on this important subject at this meetup. Christefano Reyes (@christefano) from Exaltation of Larks (@LarksLA) will present on today's security-related best practices for Drupal. The following topics will be covered:

• Common attacks to protect against
• How the Drupal project's security team works
• A security checklist anyone can use
• My site's been hacked! Now what?
• Available security tools, documentation and training materials

Drupal meetups are officially back in the San Gabriel Valley and are now on the 4th Thursday of each month. This month we're meeting at Intelligentsia Pasadena on Thursday, October 25th, 2012 from 6-8pm. Join us!

This meetup will have more of a social atmosphere and we'll have a series of lightning talks on Drupal 7 Themes and Drupal Security. We'll also be discussing this month's Drupal Design Camp LA 2012, future venues for the SGV Drupal group, or anything else our attendees are interested in.

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.

We're quickly gaining a reputation for being the only free coworking space around with a freemium business model: come work here for free and only pay for the extras, such as 24/7 access, equipment rental and a locker for your belongings.

Join us at Droplabs for a BuildaModule.com mentored training. This training is from 10am to 2pm on Friday Oct 12th.

If you're planning to attend, please signup for the camp event at ddcla.org and pick the training as a session (or signup to this event below). We'd like to connect with you in advance to know you're coming, as space may be limited.

This training will be focused on Site Building. Please bring a wifi enabled computer that you can use to connect to the internet and watch videos on (and a set of headphones).

Come get involved, learn and contribute to Drupal!

We're organizing a code sprint for Sunday Oct 14th to help get Twig into core.

Jen Lampton will be joining us to help provide direction and the Twig team will try to flag some novice issues for us to focus on.

This event is the day after Drupal Design Camp LA 2012 at Droplabs in Downtown LA. Please consider signing up for the event and picking the Twig code sprint session there (or signing up here) to receive any announcements or updates.