The fourth edition of Florida DrupalCamp is rapidly approaching - Drupalists from Florida and beyond will be descending on Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida on February 11 and 12, 2012 for the largest Drupal event Florida has ever seen.

Registration is currently open at fldrupalcamp.org at the low cost of $20 per person - the cost will be going to up $25 on January 11, so be sure to register soon to get the lowest possible price. Admission will include a t-shirt, drinks, snacks, and lunch and access to the entire session program.

Session proposals are still being accepted as well - the deadline for submitting a session is January 12, so if you're interested in sharing some of your Drupal knowledge, be sure to submit your proposal soon. 

As part of a Drupal workshop that I'm teaching (the Drupal Career Starter Program), we've been discussing Acquia Commons. Our discussions led us to decide to have a local meetup specifically to learn more about it.

Since we expect a number of newbies at the meetup, I figured I post a quick video showing how to get Commons up-and-running using Acquia Dev Desktop. I found it to be a little bit tricky, mainly because the memory requirements for Commons are a bit higher than for core Drupal. The video shows how to tweak a couple of memory setting in the php.ini file.

The first DrupalCamp South Florida will hit the campus of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale on October 22, 2011! The event is a community-organized, attendee-driven day designed to bring together and grow the South Florida Drupal community to learn, network, and share ideas.

Over the past few months since DrupalCon Chicago, I've spent some time working with other members (bhosmer, greggles, coltrane, christefano, lisarex, marguerite) of the community in reorganizing and rewriting the first version of the Drupal Camp Organizing Guide. Along with a new title (signifying the inclusion of other types of events such as sprints, summits, and hackfests), the guide is greatly enhanced with a lot of new information.

Let's face it - anyone with anything more than a passing interest in the Drupal community is probably aware that we're in the midst of embracing Git, "the fast version control system". As with just about everything else in our community, we are continuously jettising outdated technology and replacing it with modern solutions.

While we're fresh off the heels of Florida DrupalCamp 2011, it's a good time to take a look back and see how we did as well as try to figure out how to make next year's camp even better. Using results from our post-camp survey as well as feedback from my fellow organizers, here's a closer look at some specifics.

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak to a technology committee of a large organization that was considering standardizing their various web sites on Drupal. They requested a presentation and then some Q&A time - unfortunately, I didn't have any slides ready to go, so I had to scramble a bit. 

I decided to spend a couple of days (and evenings) creating a generic slidedeck that I could use for other potential clients as well as share with the rest of the Drupal community.

As the planning for Florida DrupalCamp 2011 winds down (the event takes place February 12-13, 2011), I thought it would be a good time to share the incredible success we've had with forming partnerships and finding sponsors to (hopefully) pull off an amazing Drupal event.

Tickets for Florida DrupalCamp 2011, February 12-13 at Rollins College in Winter Park, are now available at the official site: FLDrupalCamp.org. This year's event promises to the be the largest Drupal event Florida has ever seen with more of what’s been growing crowds for the past few years - now at a bigger, more comfortable venue. Tickets are just $10 and include a t-shirt, and plenty of food and drinks.

Packt Publishing keeps churning out Drupal-related books - by my count they've published nine this year alone! One of their latest efforts is Drupal 7 by David Mercer. It's a basic "intro to Drupal" book based on Drupal 7 geared towards readers new to the platform.

There are a number of topics in the book that are a bit unique, starting with a nice discussion about the GPL and the rules governing its basic usage. It's not something that is seen very often in Drupal books, and it a great introduction to open-source licensing. There is also a short section on Open ID that provides the basics without trying to go into too much detail.