Drupal

Last night (1/14/2009), Sacramento user group had a great meeting, held for the first time at its new and permanent-for-the-foreseeable-future location, Hoppy Brewing Company, which provides us with our own room, free wifi, as well as some great beer and food.

Ten of us showed up - an amazing number considering that we've had three different meeting places in the last 5 months. If we can pull ten despite previous scheduling and location difficulties, it will be very interesting to see how things evolve for the group now that it will have continuity of location and frequency!

In addition to introductions, each person gave some information about what they were hoping to do with Drupal for the coming year, as well as something they would like to see happen for the Sac DUG itself in 2009. Lots of great ideas were put forth, which included internal group stuff (code sprints, ideas/formats for monthly presentations), as well as some external stuff where we, as a group, might get involved directly with contributing-to/evangelizing Drupal and/or helping a charitable organization get going with a Drupal site.

Thanks to everyone who came, and I look forward to seeing you all Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at Hoppy Brewing Company!

Attendees:
Mac Clemmens (New to SacDUG!)
Shawn and Shannon DeArmond (and son!)
Sloane DellOrto
Caleb Gilbert
Phil Glatz
Chad Jones
Tyler Renelle
BJ Sangwan
Benjamin Shell

After software developers at Soapblox waved the white flag and said they were ceasing operations Wednesday, and despite many peoples' offers of advice and free help to get Soapblox siteowners onto something more robust and open, some have decided the best thing to do was to, well what else, embrace Soapbox even more. They've started a fund raising drive for it, and at the moment have raised almost $10,000 to "Save Soapblox".

There must be a good reason right? Naturally.

As cited in Why SoapBlox Matters Soapblox must be saved because:

"SoapBlox includes all the major features of a community blog -- namely, user diaries and other community-building features. These features are NOT readily available in any other software platform WordPress, MoveableType and others make it exceedingly difficult to do things like diaries and frontpage promotions, and SoapBlox makes it easy."

Got that? Soapblox needs to be saved there aren't things like user diaries (e.g., user-blogs) in other software platforms. (...)

Just wow. Soapblox a proprietary/closed blogging CMS architecture and hosting combination, which has been widely used for left-leaning political blogs has been hacked and Soapblox is apparently throwing in the towel. What a mess:

It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

Just got back from Do It With Drupal which was hosted by the Lullabot crew in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Despite staying up until 4am one night working, 2am the following night, and working through a couple sessions I still managed to have a great time, meet/catchup with a lot of people, and get totally re-inspired!

There was a good mix of sessions, and between the good job presenters did and the back-channel opportunities to chat with other attendees or questions to presenters, via IRC or Twitter, both newcomers to Drupal and those with more experience had a variety ofl ways to send and receive information and thus get something out of the sessions. (the IRC rooms and/or Twitter interactivity of the sessions was totally awesome - hopefully Drupalicon and/or DrupalCamp organizers will take note!)

For Drupal developers out there wondering about the value of going to something like this, or other Drupal conferences, I highly recommend it for more than just the value of what you'll learn directly in the sessions - for me, it was the being around other people who are intensely passionate about what they're doing with Drupal, as well as the personal conversations that really made the trip.

Thanks to everyone at Lullabot and all the sponsors who put on such a great show, and looking forward to seeing everyone at DrupalconDC.