Earlier this summer we released our previously commercial CMS as fully "Free Beer" under the MIT open source license. The second half of 2008 was a whirlwind for us as we were named project of the month on SourceForge and saw traffic go through the roof.

As part of running what promises to be the next Drupal, local user groups are going to be a huge component to our success. We have several starting around the states and Europe this month, with the Portland one obviously being super keen as this is our home turf.

Please join us at Hopworks on SE Powell on Jan 8th at 5pm - till late. Check out the project at http://concrete5.org RSVP at: http://www.concrete5.org/community/members/portland_or/

thanks. go pdx! -frz

concrete5 is the coolest CMS on earth and we meetup and get drunk every second thursday in portland..

YOU should join us.

http://concrete5.org

Show and Tell your concrete5 projects with other interactive media professionals. We'll meet at the lucky lab on SE Hawthrone for a meet and greet at 5pm, which will turn into a more formal show and tell at 6pm. If you've built something with concrete5, we invite you to show it off for 5 minutes and do some Q&A with your fellow developers. We'll orchestrate the evening and show off some of our recent projects and current development progress as well.

Here's what we've got on the agenda:

1. "A Case Study in Drupal 7: Care Network by Elite Care" presented by Manuel Mejia

Want to leverage the power of Drupal to address your own specific niche industry or market? Learn how this can be accomplished by examining a real-world case study of the "Care Network"—a Drupal distribution that assists staff and family members in creating "Communities of Care" for elderly and disabled people. Built on Drupal 7, the Care Network helps provision services, monitor community residents, and facilitate social interaction.

In particular, Manuel will discuss unique features of the project including real-time location tracking of all individuals on campus, programable alerts using a wide array of sensors, web enabled recording of daily notes and services, and touch screen monitors used to input and display this information. He'll also touch upon the strengths of Drupal as an application platform and how anyone can extend Drupal 7 core and contributed modules to fit their unique project requirements and needs.

1. "Building a Social Network in Drupal" presented by Ben Kaplan

Have you ever wanted to build your own social network? Or maybe add some cool social networking features to your existing website? In this presentation, Ben will demo some of the latest features of the User Relationships (http://drupal.org/project/user_relationships) and Private Message (http://drupal.org/project/privatemsg) modules—two modules he's worked on that allow you to replicate many features of popular social networks.

And what if you also want to leverage the power of other third-party social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace? Ben will demo the newest features of the Janrain Engage (http://drupal.org/project/rpx) module, including the ability to authenticate with other social networks, map user data from these networks, share content simultaneously across networks, and integrate with popular Drupal modules like Rules and Views.

Finally, here are the meeting details:

Date: Wednesday, April 13

Time: 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. (after the meeting, we head to Lucky Lab for drinks and conversation!)

Location: OpenSourcery offices (1636 NW Lovejoy St. Portland, OR 97209)

It promises to be really interesting and useful meeting... you don't want to miss it!

See you there,

Everything You Wanted to Know About Joomla! Content Construction Kits (CCKs), but where afraid to ask.

What is a content construction kit? Which one should I use? What are the differences between K2, jSeblod, Zoo, and FlexiContent, the four most popular CCKs in use today. How difficult is a CCK to learn and use? What affect will a CCK have on my template or design?

In our Joomla content construction kit presentation we are going to show you. The presentation will cover what a CCK is and why you may want to use one. We'll walk through some feature comparisons of the top four CCKs in use today to help you in choosing the right one. Discuss some of the pros and cons when implementing a CCK, like how the new content affects your templates and layouts. We'll take a sneak peek at some new CCK beta's for Joomla 1.6 and end with a discussion on what features may still be missing in the Joomla core versus a content construction kit.

What You’ll Learn

• What is a CCK
• CCK features vs Joomla 1.5 content construction (the S.C.A.M)
• Comparison chart of K2, jSeblod, Zoo, and FlexiContent
• Quick administrative back end look at each.
• Discuss which tie into Joomla's com_component and which don't effecting module creation.
• A quick look at Joomla 1.6 and the new CCK beta.

Agenda:

6:30 pm - Networking and Refreshments
7:00 pm - Welcome
7:05 pm - Content Creation Kits
7:45 pm - Meeting close and After Meeting Networking

Here's what we've got on the agenda:

1. "A Million Pageviews an Hour: Extreme Drupal Performance" presented by Aaron Longwell

The Kentucky Derby is the most watched horse racing event in the world. It's frequently called "the most exciting two minutes in sports," and is nationally televised on 3 different networks and simulcast worldwide. All that excitement results in www.kentuckyderby.com, the race's official Drupal-powered web site receiving more than 1 million page views in less than an hour.

Presented by Aaron Longwell, Chief Technologist at Culture Foundry, this presentation will cover the hardware, software, Drupal modifications and extensions that enabled the site to serve every one of those pages with sub-200ms response times. In particular, Aaron's talk will discuss helpful Drupal modules, Varnish, HTTP in-browser caching, load balancing, redundancy, load testing, Pressflow, Amazon Web Services, and Capistrano--and how each played a part in the Kentucky Derby site.

Even small sites with little traffic can benefit from many of the techniques and technologies Aaron will be discussing. The talk will be relatively technical in nature (there will even be a bit of code) but even non-developers should learn something about the principles behind super high performance web sites.

2. "Location + Maps: Making it Actually Work" presented by Katrin Silvius

In her recent work, Katrin Silvius, senior web developer at One Economy, has discovered all sorts of bugs and workarounds necessary to make location and maps work well together in Drupal. Katrin will discuss some of the things she's learned from her work and we'll open up the discussion to other developers about best practices and nagging problems with implementing location and maps in Drupal.

Finally, here are the meeting details:

Date: Wednesday, June 8 Time: 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. (after the meeting, we head to Lucky Lab NW at 1945 NW Quimby, for drinks and conversation!)

We meet, work on our projects, and ask questions of our neighbors with no formal agenda.

No need to RSVP, the meetings are open to all.

Joomla! PDX is a user group dedicated to all things Joomla!.

Come join us!

Joomla! PDX is a user group dedicated to all things Joomla!.

Come join us!

Joomla! PDX is a user group dedicated to all things Joomla!.

Come join us!

A content management system (CMS) is a computer program that makes it easy to create, edit, and display HTML/Internet content. Some popular CMS include Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Learn the basics of how CMS can make your website creation easier and better.

All classes are free to our volunteers and the general public. Please sign up in advance by visiting the volunteer desk at Free Geek or calling us at 503-232-9350.

Joomla! PDX is a user group dedicated to all things Joomla!.

Come join us!

Joomla! PDX is a user group dedicated to all things Joomla!.

Come join us!

Joomla! PDX is a user group dedicated to all things Joomla!.

Come join us!

http://www.joomlapdx.com/events/presentations/33-march-2013-joomla-open-house

We know... You're thinking "OMG, a Joomla Open House!!!!! ... Errrr, wait a minute, what is a Joomla Open House, exactly?"

Great question. In short, it's a gathering of (1) Joomla fanatics, (2) Joomla newbies, (3) Joomla-curious, and (4) others who maybe aren't totally "in love" with Joomla, but who might not mind fooling around a little bit with Joomla if there's beer involved, if you know what we mean. (Okay, actually, we don't even know what we mean by that one.)

What we were thinking was: If you've got a web site and are having some technical difficulties, then come to our open house, bring (1) any Joomla, web development, technical, or philosophical questions you like, no matter how easy or tough they are, (2) your laptops if you want to do some work right then and there (or, we may also project your site up onto the wall and work on it in front of others, if that's cool with you), and (3) your admin usernames/passwords, of course, if you want us to be able to look at your Joomla issues. And, if you have a "service dog," bring him or her along, too -- because, remember, here in Portland, no one ever asks you to verify whether your pooch is or isn't working. Anyway, your humble Joomla in-house experts will then roll up our sleeves and do the best we can to either fix your issue or at least point you in the right direction.

Types of tech difficulties: Actually, we're fairly open-minded here... Bring us any web-development challenge you're having and we're happy to talk about it -- even it it's not 100% Joomla-related. For example, maybe you're having trouble using CSS, or you're facing a user experience challenge, or you don't understand how MySQL works, or you need a little bit of PHP wizardry. Bring it on. We're not saying we'll actually solve your issue right then and there, but we're certain that we're geeky enough to probably give you way too many vague answers and contradictory directions. (On second thought, maybe don't come. ... No, we're kidding; DO come, okay?)

Please join us!

-= The Skinny =-

WHAT? Joomla! Open! House! WHEN? March 14th, 2013 -- 5:45 p.m. to 8-ish / maybe 8:30 / or, like, whenever. WHERE? At Backstage (3702 SE Hawthorne -- just behind the Bagdad Theater in SE PDX). HOW? Oh, you mean how much? It's FREE!! WHY? Because Joomla rocks and all other CMSs are laughably inferior.

Drupal Global Training Days is an initiative by the Drupal Association to introduce new and beginning users to Drupal. We welcome novice and beginner students to join the Drupal Association for an Introduction to Drupal lesson for FREE. This will be a very basic introduction to what Drupal is, how to utilize it and highlighting where to look on Drupal.org for continued support. Please provide your name, email addresss, and designated Drupal knowledge (Novice or Beginner).

Where: Drupal Association Offices, 209 SW Oak St, Suite 100

When: Saturday August 22nd 9-3 pm

Coffee and snacks provided. Lunch currently will not be provided.

Drupal Global Training Days is an initiative by the Drupal Association to introduce new and beginning users to Drupal. We welcome novice and beginner students to join the Drupal Association for an Introduction to Drupal lesson for FREE. This will be a very basic introduction to what Drupal is, how to utilize it and highlighting where to look on Drupal.org for continued support. Please provide your name, email address, and designated Drupal knowledge (Novice or Beginner). Greg Boggs of ThinkShout will be providing the training.

Where: Drupal Association Offices, 209 SW Oak St, Suite 100

When: Saturday August 22nd 9-3 pm

Coffee and snacks provided. Lunch will not be provided.

Drupal Global Training Days is an initiative by the Drupal Association to introduce new and beginning users to Drupal. We welcome students to join the Drupal Association for an Introduction to Drupal lesson for FREE. This will be a very basic introduction to what Drupal is, how to utilize it and highlighting where to look on Drupal.org for continued support. Please provide your name, email address, and designated Drupal knowledge (Novice or Beginner). Greg Boggs of ThinkShout will be providing the training.

Where: Drupal Association Offices, 209 SW Oak St, Suite 100

When: Saturday February 6th 9:00 am - 3:00 pm

Coffee and snacks provided. Lunch will not be provided.

Drupal Global Training Days is an initiative by the Drupal Association to introduce new and beginning users to Drupal. We welcome novice and beginner students to join the Drupal Association for an Introduction to Drupal lesson for FREE. This will be a very basic introduction to what Drupal is, how to utilize it and highlighting where to look on Drupal.org for continued support. Please provide your name, email address, and designated Drupal knowledge (Novice or Beginner). Greg Boggs of ThinkShout will be providing the training.

Where: Drupal Association Offices, 209 SW Oak St, Suite 100

When: Friday April 8th from 9:00-3:00 pm

Coffee and snacks provided. Lunch will not be provided.

https://groups.drupal.org/portland

See > https://groups.drupal.org/node/534929 for official, full description.

RSVP and add to calendar for a reminder here > https://www.meetup.com/Portland-Drupal/events/zpxfrqyzhblb/