Sponsored by TechAmerica, the Social Networks and the Enterprise Unite event will showcase how technology company leaders and employees are establishing a new set of best practices to mine, measure and apply online social networking in the technology industry. April 1 at 7:30 a.m. at Multonomah Athletic Club. TechAmerica Members $125, nonmembers $175.

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