LA Drupal User Group Meeting (April 2009) April 28, 2009

L.A. Drupal - Los Angeles' Professional Drupal Network & User Group

When? Tuesday, March 31st, 7:30PM-9:30PM
Where? 902 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, CA 90401 (Venue Sponsor: CauseCast.org)
Map: http://tinyurl.com/LAdrupal-meetup-venue

Whats an LA Drupal meetup like? Fun & Interesting!

LA Drupal meetups are free and open to anyone interested in Drupal from beginner to guru, but you have to bring a fun attitude and be willing to share or learn.

We have areas for networking, general topics, and more advanced learning and sharing. Presentations and a big breakout session at the end to chat and network.

We like to highlight and encourage folks with cool local projects to present at upcoming meetings. In the past year we've had presenters from Warner Brothers Records; hosting over a hundred artist sites on Drupal, standup2cancer.org - over a million hits in one day during the airing of the show, and local shops such as www.ThisByThem.com, www.openChimp.com, www.chillco.com, www.exaltations.net, www.IJHANA.com, www.WorkHabit.com, www.AchieveInternet.com, and others. Topics have included How to build your first Drupal Module, Using Views 1 & Views 2, Panels module, Drush module, Theming, and Scaling Drupal & Cloud computing among others.

Have a topic you'd like to see? Add it here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/9220

Agenda:
Free Beer & Pizza provided by our host: www.causecast.org

Book Raffles sponsored by Apress and Wrox publishing.

Main Presentation Area

Main presentation area holds up to 80 people and is geared towards general interest topics, especially geared towards people who are new to Drupal or the Topic(s) being presented. It is also a forum for sharing, asking questions.

Presentation: "Drupal Sites In 30 Minutes!" Want to see a complete Drupal site be built in front of your eyes in 30 minutes or less? LA Drupal manager, Chris Charlton, will demo a fresh new site being built in 30 minutes or less. This isn't a boring demo but more of a wild safari full of Drupal steps that are important. You are sure to learn something new!

Lightning Talks - come prepared to talk for 5 min. about something you'd like to share with the Drupal group. Finished a new Drupal site? Find a cool new module? Keep it succinct - you get stopped at five minutes - but we'll be nice about it.

Q & A followed by Job Announcements.

Drupal Labs

The idea behind Labs is to provide a forum to help developers and themers get to the next level or to provide a discussion room where elementary explanations on drupal don't need to be revisited. The Labs room fits 10-15 people max. in a workroom with a projector.

Labs Theme (subject to change)
Dissecting Drupal: API's, best practices, cool tricks, Drupal trickery
Project Tools: What applications are in your toolbox? Why do you use them? What steps do you take when you first take on a project. What do you use for version control? I'm using bazaar, and can share why I like it for web development. I like Netbeans & gedit.

And...
In addition to our presentation(s) of the night we have open-mic opportunities for those who have general Drupal questions or need help during our wonderful meeting segment, "Ask the LA Drupal Community." Need to just ask another human a Drupal question? Then this is that chance.

We have raffle prizes for attendees, and as always, the end of the meeting is our networking session with the fun and knowledgeable LA Drupal crowd.

Those wishing to make announcements for Drupal jobs/work, please contact Chris Charlton and we can provide time for you to speak to the audience.

Tags for the night:
Post photos on Flickr.com with the tag "ladrupal" and "drupal".

Organizers:
Chris Charlton
Mike Stewart

Official Website: http://groups.drupal.org/node/21536