Just a friendly reminder that this WEDNESDAY (August 11) is the date of our monthly Portland Drupal User Group Meeting. What's Drupal, you ask? It's a PHP-based content management system that helps you build the best websites in the world!

We're super excited for this meeting.... We've got two awesome presentations on the agenda:

1. "Janrain Engage: Connecting Drupal with the Social Web" presented by Brian McGinnis, Forest Basford & Larry Drebes (Janrain team members)

Need to quickly connect your Drupal website to the social web? Janrain Engage (formerly RPX) may be just what the doctor (or developer!) ordered. Key team members from Portland-based Janrain will be here to discuss their Janrain Engage service and how it empowers your site visitors to sign-in with their existing accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, MySpace, AOL, or other networks, and then simultaneously publish user comments, reviews or other activities from your site to multiple networks. In particular, the Janrain team will address the current state of the Janrain Engage Drupal module (http://drupal.org/project/rpx ), ongoing efforts to port the module to Drupal 7, and the latest roadmap for future module enhancements--plus important insights into how you can best leverage the power of third-party social networks. It's also a great opportunity to learn how local Drupal developers can get involved.

2. "Git for Drupal (Part II, Advanced Git)" presented by Michael Schwern

At last month's meeting, local git expert Michael Schwern did a great job introducing us to git--even demonstrating for us (with tinker toys!) git's underlying simplicity and elegance of implementation. Now it's time to kick things up a notch by going beyond the theoretical to the practical: In this more advanced presentation, Michael will delve deeper into essential git commands--including how to best create repositories, add files, clone, commit, fork, branch, stash, and merge. Because a Drupal project has some special considerations that other projects don’t, he'll cover some important key action steps (such as using remote vendor branches to track Drupal core and modules, leveraging the benefits of github.com, and merging in your local patches). We'll also open up the discussion to experienced git users in the audience who will offer their insights into best practices for using git with Drupal. With Drupal.org switching from CVS to git, now is the time to embrace version control in your projects and become a power git user!

Finally, here are the meeting details:

Date: Wednesday, August 11 Time: 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. (after the meeting, we head to Lucky Lab for drinks) Location: OpenSourcery offices (1636 NW Lovejoy St. Portland, OR 97209)

It promises to be an awesome meeting... you absolutely don't want to miss it!

For more details on this meeting and to stay current on the latest Portland Drupal User Group news, please visit this web page:

http://groups.drupal.org/portland

See you there, Ben Kaplan

Hello Portland Android Developers!

Janrain is getting ready to release version 1.0 of the brand new Engage for Android library which includes an abstract and easy to implement user authentication component, as well as an extremely simple to use social sharing UI. In anticipation of our upcoming release, we’re hosting a fast track introduction workshop for interested Android application developers.

Who might be interested: Are you an Android app developer? Are you interested in authenticating your users via Google, Facebook and other identity providers? Perhaps you are interested in enabling social sharing - including tweets and wall posts - directly from your app? Save time and effort, and leverage the benefits of our abstract implementation - the Engage for Android library.

What our product does: The Janrain Engage for Android library provides a system to authenticate Android application users with their existing identity accounts - e.g. Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The library also provides a system to enable your users to share information from your application via their social networking accounts (LinkedIn, Yahoo, Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.)

What our event is: Janrain is hosting a coding workshop at our downtown office. If you are interested in adding our library to your Android application, we invite you to come! (Please bring your laptop.)

At this workshop we’ll walk through everything an Android application developer needs to implement authentication and social sharing with the Engage for Android library, including: IDE integration, Android project configuration, build system troubleshooting, Engage application creation and configuration, authentication system design (including Engage token URLs!), and social sharing invocation.

When our event is: Thursday, June 9 2011, starting 5pm.

Where our event is: The Janrain Office @ 519 SW 3rd Ave, Suite 600, Portland, OR 97204.

Please click RSVP to [email protected], so we can save you a spot and make sure there is enough food and beer. We are looking forward to a fun filled evening with the Android developer community.

So, please join us for an evening of coding, beer and pizza!

TL;DR: Do you want to authenticate your users or do social sharing ezmode? -> Come to our workshop.

This meetup is going to be another epic interview with Russell Smith, Software Test Manager at JanRain. He joined there just over a year ago and is excited to share the journey leading up to his pretty cool job there.

He will also talk to us about what JanRain is doing in the field of customer profile management and customer intelligence.

The experience and value you will get from this meetup is going to be unlike any other you ever saw... You have my personal guarantee!

Oh, as always, this meetup is POWERED BY FREE PIZZA :)