saint louis

The organizers of DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 are excited to announce that the schedule is set for DrupalCamp STL.15; we will have sessions from a variety of presenters on a variety of topics—for both beginners and seasoned veterans alike!

Some of the great sessions lined up include a session on Git basics, the status of Migrate in Drupal 8, content strategy, securing Drupal, improving performance, improving search, Twig, and more! To kick it off, we'll have an awesome keynote from Alina Mackenzie (alimac) about getting involved in the Drupal Community.

Check out the sessions: DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 Session Schedule.

Register for DrupalCamp STL.15 today, and build your schedule on the site—besides these excellent sessions, you'll get a tasty catered lunch, a comfy t-shirt, and some great memories and networking opportunities on both days of the Camp!

DrupalCamp STL.15 (June 20-21, in St. Louis, MO) will be the first DrupalCamp in St. Louis with a day dedicated to sprints to help the Drupal community. We're expecting a great turnout, and there are already a number of proposed sessions (many of which will be selected and announced on June 5!), and it's not yet too late to propose a session of your own!

This year's keynote, by Alina Mackenzie, will focus on the Drupal Community—what it is, why it rocks, and how you can get involved in the community. After the keynote, some great sessions, a tasty lunch, happy hour, and a good night's rest, we'll spend sprint day (Sunday June 21) making Drupal better, and maybe even pushing Drupal 8 a little closer to an 8.0.0 rc1 release!

Registration is now open, so go reserve your spot at DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015; I'll see you there, hopefully at one of the sessions I proposed, either on High Performance Drupal, or Local Development Environments and Drupal VM!

DrupalCamp St. Louis is scheduled for June 20-21, 2015, and will be held at SLU LAW in downtown St. Louis, MO. Less than a month away, there are a few important bits of news:

DrupalCamp STL.15 Keynote Speaker: Alina Mackenzie (alimac)

Alina Mackenzie is a developer and system administrator based in Chicago. In the Drupal community she is a camp organizer, speaker and communications lead for DrupalCon mentored sprints. She is passionate about learning organizations, automation, and making open source friendly for beginners.

Alina's keynote will focus on "Finding the entrance: Why and how to get involved with the Drupal community".

Alina's Drupal.org profile is https://www.drupal.org/u/alimac

Session Submission Deadline: May 29

Please submit your session proposals by Friday, May 29—just over a week from today! We'll notify speakers on June 5th whether a session was accepted or not.

We hope to see you at DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015! Registration will open next Monday, and sessions will be announced on June 5th.

The Garden Glow at the Missouri Botanical Garden is in its second year, and it seems to already be a 'thing to do' in St. Louis over the wintry holiday season.

Nikon D7000, 17-55mm @ 55mm, ISO 800, f/2.8, 1/60

I'd rank it almost equal to the great light displays at Our Lady of Snows Shrine, Tilles Park, and the St. Louis Zoo. Along a large portion of the Garden's paths, various light displays take you around some of this historic sites and buildings inside the Garden, and while parts are a bit 'touristy' feeling, the event is nice if the weather cooperates.

Now that Drupal 8.0.0-beta1 is out, and the headless Drupal craze is in full-swing, the Drupal St. Louis meetup this month will focus on using Drupal 8 with AngularJS to build a demo pizza ordering app. (The meetup is on Thurs. Oct. 23, starting at 6:30 p.m.; see even more info in this Zero to Drupal post).

We'll be hacking away and seeing how far we can get, and hopefully we'll be able to leave with at least an MVP-quality product! I'll be at the event, mostly helping people get a Drupal 8 development environment up and running. For some, this alone will hopefully be a huge help, and maybe motivation to adopt Drupal 8 more quickly!

If you're in or around the St. Louis area, consider joining us; especially if you would like to learn something about either Drupal 8 or AngularJS!

P.S. To those who have been emailing: the rest of the Apache Solr search series is coming, it's just been postponed while I've started a new job at Acquia, and had a new baby!

I presented Drupal 8 - A Brief Introduction at DrupalCamp STL.14 on April 26, 2014.

Drupal 8 brings a lot of changes. Many standby contributed modules are now included with Drupal Core, and many small changes add up to the most exciting Drupal release yet! This presentation guides you through many of the biggest changes, highlighting how Drupal 8 will accelerate your web development and provide tools to make Drupal the best content management platform on any device.

View the slideshow below, or follow the links at the bottom of the post to view the full presentation and video.

Links for full slideshow/video:

My sister's family just started a new St. Louis-area business, The Easy Chicken, providing resources to those interested in raising chickens in an urban or suburban environment.

There are some potentially difficult and time-consuming aspects to keeping chickens in an urban environment: acquiring chickens, seeking permits or licenses from particular municipalities, finding a source for feed, coops, and other materials, and finding reliable information about keeping chickens healthy. The Easy Chicken's tagline is Backyard eggs made easy, and they have the easy part nailed down, as they'll help anyone through all the different steps, and provide all the necessary supplies (including guaranteed-to-lay hens!).

I mentioned this elsewhere (see: DrupalCon and DrupalCamp news), but I'll post here as well; I'm going to be speaking at both DrupalCon Austin and DrupalCamp St. Louis this year!

I've submitted a few sessions to DrupalCon Austin in the past, mostly surrounding the Honeypot module for Drupal, but this year, a session I submitted in the DevOps track was chosen: DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory!. I figured since I'm writing a book on Ansible, and I use Ansible to provision servers and do all the deployments for my Drupal sites, I might as well show other Drupal developers how easy it is to get started and how much you can do with Ansible!

This week, the DrupalCon Austin sessions have been posted, and I'm thrilled to have one of my session submissions (in the DevOps track) selected: DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory!.

The session will go over how Ansible can be used to realize faster, easier, and more successful Drupal deployments, as well as Ansible's ability to make sure that every environment is 'like production', so you don't ever have surprises when you deploy code to its final destination.

St. Louis is getting ready for its first-ever DrupalCamp! On April 26, 2014, DrupalCamp St. Louis will open up with a keynote by Brad Nowak, a Business Development Manager at Palantir. The Camp will have sessions covering a variety of topics, like Drupal 8 and how your business can benefit from Drupal's flexibility. It will be held at Washington University's West Campus in Clayton, MO, just a few blocks from a MetroLink station and only a few minutes away from Downtown St. Louis!

Online registration is open already, and for the next couple of weeks, earlybird registration is only $15! For that tiny fee you get: