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Theming, Design & Usability

Design 4 Drupal - no more fugly!

mortendk 10 August 2010
Type:  BOF session

Come Join the not so secret underground movement of beautiful designer, awesome front end developers & other Drupal lovers who wanna make drupal look as good on the outside as on the inside!

The Design 4 Drupal group have been working the last couple of years to create a space for "frontend developers" where we can find shelter for the evil developers & demanding clients ;)

The last year a lot have happend 2 "D4D" camps have been held in Boston, a new base theme have been added to drupal7, and we have succeed in putting ourself on the map in the drupal community.

Additional Presenters:  Todd Nienkerk
Resources:  design 4 drupal group

Protocons: an icon set for Drupal

yoroy 5 July 2010
Type:  Not planned session

For designers who want to help build a Drupal-specific icon library. For developers who want to help implement it.

Protocons is a clean and consistent collection of icons, buttons, glyphs and other graphic elements for building Drupal user interfaces. Aim is to define the standard visual metaphors for Drupal concepts and actions.

Looking for people who want to help maintain the library and make it easy to use them across different modules.

Resources:  Protocons project

Grok Drupal Theming

Laura Scott 5 July 2010
Type:  Not planned session

So you know your CSS. You have you xhtml down, even are up on HTML5. But Drupal throws so much other stuff at you. What do you do? Where do you start?

This session provides an overview of how themes work in Drupal. The technical architecture may seem complex, but it's actually quite simple once you grasp the concepts and structures.

Topics covered include:

  • Core templates and how they work together
  • Most-used templates and the variables available
  • Overriding templates for common use cases
  • The Drupal design patterns you will need to design and theme for (whether you like it or not)
  • Changes between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7
  • Modules that make theming easier and/or more powerful
  • The parent-child theme thing
  • Working with module templates, including Views and CCK
  • Gotchas, tips and tricks

Aloha Editor - the HTML5 Editor - An outstanding new Editor User Experience

Haymo Meran 4 July 2010
Type:  Not planned session

World’s most advanced Editor is designed to give the user a complete new experience when editing a website, wiki or blog. It can load 10x faster than existing technologies and offers unprecedented opportunities.

Easier. Better. Faster.

You can edit the website content as you see it. You do not need to save or preview to see how your text will look like on the final website. You can see the real changes the right moment you type. You do not need to log into a backend to edit any text. You edit on the actual frontend website. You neither do have to load a rich text editor. Just edit right ahead. You still do have all capabilities advanced rich text editors offers.

=Aloha Editor. The HTML5 Editor.=
World’s most advanced Editor is designed to give the user a complete new experience when editing a website, wiki, blog or any other content. I can be 3x faster than existing technologies and offers offers unprecedented opportunities.

==Easier.==
===Many tried WYSIWYG and did not achieve. We succeeded.===

Building blocks for your module's UI

yoroy 4 July 2010
Type:  Not planned session

The Drupal 7 user experience will be as good as contributed modules make it.

There are more interface patterns available to Drupal module developers then ever before. Drupal has standars for writing code. But what about the interface?

Tabs, accordions, fieldsets, overlays, hover links etc. How do you decide when to use which?

Join Roy Scholten from the UX-Team for a tour of the available options and guidelines on when to use each one. We'll update you on the actual interaction pattern library we are working on as well.

Usability testing – doing it, sharing it, building on it

yoroy 4 July 2010
Type:  Not planned session

Do you see people use Drupal? Noticing things that confuse them? UX-team would love to hear from you!

Because the one biggest usability issue with Drupal is that there are so very many little ones.

Goal is to lower the barrier for incremental design tweaks based on usability data.
Lets make it easier to share user observations, get better at learning from them and use it inform Drupal design and code.

A Nightmare in your themes folder (2010)

Marek Sotak 4 July 2010
Type:  Not planned session

We all know that learning from mistakes is the best way to learn how not to do things. In this session I will pick some of the worst nightmares I have stumbled upon during my 5 years with Drupal theming (eventualy we will look into D7 possible nightmares, such as hook_alter). I am pretty sure that some of you have still sleepless nights while thinking about a ticking bomb in your theme. If not, you might not even be aware of such problems and/or wrong approaches.

Theming the Enterprise

Jen Simmons 4 July 2010
Type:  Session in official program

How to theme 17 websites at the same time, using Skinr and strategy.

Last winter, when the recession hit my corner of the web world, I went and got myself one of those full-time jobs. Suddenly instead of designing, building and theming each site from beginning to end as a separate project, I found myself in a mosh-pit of 40 developers, developing dozens of sites at the same time. We've been moving a whole "enterprise level" corporation over to Drupal, rapidly theming without any visual designs (still waiting). Come hear about what I've learned, and the strategy I created for best reusing code and coordinating the efforts of the team.

Grok Drupal Theming

Laura Scott 4 July 2010
Type:  Not planned session

So you know your CSS. You have you xhtml down, even are up on HTML5. But Drupal throws so much other stuff at you. What do you do? Where do you start?

This session provides an overview of how themes work in Drupal. The technical architecture may seem complex, but it's actually quite simple once you grasp the concepts and structures.

Topics covered include:

  • Core templates and how they work together
  • Most-used templates and the variables available
  • Overriding templates for common use cases
  • The Drupal design patterns you will need to design and theme for (whether you like it or not)
  • Changes between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7
  • Modules that make theming easier and/or more powerful
  • The parent-child theme thing
  • Working with module templates, including Views and CCK
  • Gotchas, tips and tricks

Theme Preprocess Functions: an Introduction

Carl Wiedemann 4 July 2010
Type:  Session in official program

How many times has this happened to you: You're theming a Drupal site, writing your CSS and making a few changes to the tpl files here and there. Everything is going great, then suddenly you realize you need to change one of those things that starts with a "$" inside those funny-looking <?php ?> tags. Panic!