We have a great meetup this month in the San Gabriel Valley. Join us from 6-8pm at Fuller Theological Seminary, Glasser 110 on Thursday, March 27, 2014, for Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, raffle prizes, community Q&A, lightning talks and full-length presentations.
You can join our video conference here or go to https://zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID: 811 203 893
Are you new to Drupal or the SGV Drupal meetup? Come learn about Drupal and how others like yourself are using it for their project, business or organization. We promise not to talk down to you. Here's a testimonial from a happy attendee:
This is a very well organized and informative session. We got a good mix of senior developers and new comers and some in between. It is a pretty good turn out with 11 people considering it is in Pasadena right around rush hours. People are just terrific, very friendly and ready to help others. Feels like I have moved forward by leaps and bounds. Thanks everyone!
Thank You to Our Sponsors!
Sponsors help make our events happen. To learn more about sponsorship of our group and our upcoming events, please contact Christefano on Drupal.org or Meetup.com.
Our raffle prize sponsor for this event is Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal design and engineering firm with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles. Visit us at www.larks.la and follow us at @LarksLA to learn more about our Drupal services and upcoming trainings.
Our organizing sponsor is Droplabs (@Droplabs), a Drupal-friendly coworking space, classroom and makerspace in Downtown Los Angeles. We're the leading low-cost coworking space in the Greater Los Angeles Area and have workspaces and services that are uniquely designed for small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers and remote workers.
Zoom Conferencing The Cloud Meeting Company is our new conferencing sponsor. Thanks to them we can offer a more robust video and audio conferencing of our meetings.
Presentations & Lightning Talks
Do you have a presentation or job announcement that you'd like to share with the group? Is there a topic about anything you'd like to see a presentation on? Post a comment below to let all the organizers and attendees know what you're interested in. Lightning Talks — brief, 5-minute long presentations on any topic related to Drupal — are very welcome.
GLADCamp Review, the Greater Los Angeles Drupal Camp
GLADCamp 2014, is now in our recent past. Come and share your thoughts about this exciting event. Help us figure out what is next!
Users Helping Users
The meetup this month will include 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 Drupal professionals that there are plenty of Drupal experts and professionals who attend our meetups and sometimes they need help, too!
Agenda
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 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 will begin at 6:00
Introductions & Job Announcements
News & Upcoming Events, including:
• Acquia Certification Webchix's opinion
• Google Cloud Services event
• Drupalcon Austin early bird savings end April 4
• Drupalcamp LA Sept 6 and 7
• Drupal.LA Project Proposal;
• Interesting events listed at http://groups.drupal.org/events
Users Helping Users
Community Questions & Answers
7pm
Raffle Prizes!
Lightning Talks & Featured Presentations
• GLADCamp Review
• Follow up on Workbench Moderation discussion
• Getting Started with Drupal 8
• Performance Tips
8pm
Wrap-up, Clean-up & Close-up
Drupal After Dark
What to Bring
Just bring your laptop, your business cards or whatever else you need. Extra points go to anyone who can bring power cords and extension strips.
Do you have a job announcement? Post your job announcement first and be sure to bring plenty of business cards and printouts of your job description to the meetup.
Are you looking for work? Update your profiles on Drupal.org and LinkedIn prior to the meetup and bring plenty of business cards and copies of your resume.
If you'd like us to print out copies of your job description or resume and have them ready at our "take a card, leave a card" table, please contact Christefano on Drupal.org or Meetup.com.
Drupal After Dark
After the meetup ends at 8pm, we'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at a nearby restaurant or pub. Even if you can't make it to the meetup, going to the Drupal After Dark is a great way to meet your fellow Drupal community friends and colleagues. Join us!
Raffle prizes! Collect them all! Must be present to win!
Raffle prizes at this meetup have been provided by Droplabs and Exaltation of Larks. Our raffle prizes often include discount codes, magazines, DVDs, books and tickets to attend professional, paid Drupal trainings. Some raffle prizes may be available to remote attendees (at the discretion of the meetup organizers and raffle prize sponsors).
We are always grateful to our sponsors for their continued support. If you have any items you'd like to donate to the raffle, please contact any of the organizers at the meetup. Thank you!
Location and Directions
Fuller Theological Seminary, Glasser 110. The campus is located between Walnut and Oakland, between Los Robles and Madison.
Fuller Theological Seminary
Glasser 110
135 North Oakland Avenue
Pasadena, CA
Glasser is building G in the drawing. There is street parking on Madison or Green. There is a time limit but they expire at 6:00 so should not have a problem for the meetup.
Carpooling
Attendees are encouraged to save both time and fuel by carpooling to this event. The best way to find out how and who to carpool with is to post an offer or request with your location and contact information in the comments below.
Sign Up!
Sign up below to receive the meetup's date, time and location by email. An automatic email reminder will also be sent 1 day before the event.
Comments
Update on Workbench Moderation
I released the site I talked about with Workbench Moderation and non-published content. I wanted to share some lessons I learned.
Google Cloud and Drupal?
I received an announcement from Google about an announcement on their Cloud improvements. One of the article is running Drupal on Google Cloud.
http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2014/03/drupal-on-google-app-eng...
This may be something to discuss at the meetup.
That's an interesting
That's an interesting article. It took a couple clicks but the good stuff is in a whitepaper over in Google Docs at http://bit.ly/DrupalonGAE
In that whitepaper, there's info on getting Drupal 7, multisite, Apache Solr, SSO (single sign on) and Varnish, all working on the Google Cloud Platform.
Acquia Certification Program
Interesting Acquia is starting a certification program. They are having a webinar on Wednesday the 26th. I plan on attending the webinar and will bring anything I learn to the meetup.
This is an interesting concept, just depends on how Acqua centric it is compared to Drupal centric, and the costs involved. If it is free or low cost this type certification can be good.
Posted Video Conference information
I posted the video conferencing information.
You can join our video conference here or go to https://zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID: 811 203 893
Interesting service. I read
Interesting service. I read Walt Mossberg's review and would be happy to give it a try.
By the way, Greater Los Angeles Drupal meetups have a video sponsor already. :) Here's the wiki page showing all the shared assets and resources for our meetups and other events:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/286433
So far, I'm VERY impressed
So far, I'm VERY impressed with Zoom.us. The pricing looks great, and I'm looking forward to trying this with the SGV Drupal meetup.
Paul, do you know if there's a way to dial people in by phone, or find out the call-in information before the meeting starts?
Meeting link in the post
The meeting link is in the body of the meeting post. To repeat it:
You can join our video conference here or go to https://zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID: 811 203 893
I did not include the telephone dial in information:
Join from dial-in phone line:
Meeting link in the post
The meeting link is in the body of the meeting post. To repeat it:
You can join our video conference here or go to https://zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID: 811 203 893
I did not include the telephone dial in information:
Join from dial-in phone line:
Update on Workbench Moderation
There were a couple things I neglected to mention in my lightning talk on Thursday.
First - I was importing users from another system. It uses md5 passwords so I was able to simply import from the mysql database. Initially I was using a copy of the systems database, I had to change this to use the MySql server. I had to scour the comments but finally found the way to use a different server for the migrate from the MySql server used by Drupal. After I found the correct information it worked well but it took some time.
Second - I ran into a bug in either Workbench Moderation or Rules UI. I loaded a new module to format the email messages but then when I would go into the rules ui I would get a php error. I was stuck on this for a while until I decided to rebuild the rule and see when it failed. I created a new rule for draft status. It worked and when I went back to the rules that failed they work now. There seems to be a pointer that gets off, if you go back to a default state it corrects the pointer and all works now.
The trouble shooting of these issues delayed things a couple days. This was not 16 hours of trouble shooting but it took all the free time for a couple days to resolve these issues.
Now I understand these issues and the system is working.
Blog Project
I wanted to let you all in on a long term project. Recently I was approached by someone about an issue on my main website. This had to do with page load speeds, I was aware of the situation but have not been able to resolve the whole issue. These can be easily addressed with a new design, especially with Drupal which has a configuration switch that resolves this. I thought this would be a good time to dry to dump the last 8 years of experience on supporting a website. So I started a blog series on the anatomy of a website. I am hoping I can work in this a little each week but it is still a year long process or so. You can help by encouraging me to keep it up. The initial post is https://paulfcoleman.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/anaatomy-of-a-website-a-co...
Read it, comment, encourage me. As I state this is my opinion so I do not want this to deteriorate into a forum about website design but rather a knowledge dump.