Does Features make you want to break your guitar? Do you wonder why that #$!@ feature won’t revert? Think you should put all your stuff in one huge feature and just hope for the best?

Give up amateur hour! Understand and architect your features like a rock star (with more cowbell)!!

The net is filled with information about how to use each of the many pieces that Drupal gives you, but how do you put it all together to actually do something useful? Figuring out how to combine content types, fields, taxonomies, entities, web services, custom modules, database tables, files, and all sorts of other elements is what Drupal architecture is all about.

The adult supervision is out of town, so KALAMUNA is taking over this month's EBDUG!

We're bringing the party to the East Bay: speakers, beverages, snacks, and good times.

The first session will showcase how easy it is to get a Drupal site up and running with Kalabox. It will appeal to hardcore developers who need an awesome and customizable native linux local development stack to supercharge their development workflow, but also to new users who just want to get started working with Drupal without all the annoying setup.

Nathan Haug and Jen Lampton

Backdrop is a fork of Drupal.  It is intended to be a full-featured content management system that allows non-technical users to manage a wide variety of content. Backdrop will be feature-comparable with Drupal 8 (containing things like CMI, WYSIWYG & Views in core), but will be built on APIs more similar to those found in Drupal 7.

We're excited to have Backdrop founders Nate Haug and Jen Lampton live and in-person for the October EBDUG meeting.  Join us on Oct 30 (just after BADCamp) at the usual time (6:30 PM) in our usual location, Tech Liminal in downtown Oakland -- just 2 blocks from the 12th St. BART station.

Brian Young and Megan Miller

Responsive design is the future of the web. More and more people are using mobile devices of all shapes and sizes to access the web and, more than ever, websites need to respond to this changing landscape of devices. Yet there are many different ways people are approaching this in the Drupal community.

Brian and Megan will tease apart what they mean by “responsive web design,” focusing specifically on a “content first” approach to designing responsive layouts. They will discuss various aspects to consider, including preservation of content hierarchy, support and strategy for complex layouts, and ease of implementation for site builders, content editors, and designers.

They will also demo Open Framework, a new Drupal theme that uses Bootstrap and provides a simple yet powerful way to create complex responsive layouts, and discuss the complexities of designing a responsive theme for an ever-changing, multi-device landscape.

Drupal started off as Dries Buytaert's personal project -- an intranet for himself and a few neighbors -- which he released to the world in January of 2001.  12 years later, it now runs some of the largest sites in the world, and a large community of professional developers are devoted to creating Drupal sites that can handle millions of page views.  But can it still handle small sites, created and run entirely by a single developer?  Or does it now require a team to create and maintain a professional-level Drupal site?