Designer

There's been a tremendous effort in making Drupal accessible. The primary question is, now that we've made it this far, how well does Drupal support the authoring of accessible Web content to everyone? The quality of Drupal in supporting accessible content creation is critical. It's more than marking off a checklist. It's about making that accessibility sustainable through the life cycle of that product.

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.

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.

-Drupal User Group
-Local group or linguistic group
-Industries related group
-Drupal association worldwide

Should we adopt a Drupal Code of Conduct (#DCOC) ?
How can can it works together ?
How can it help Drupal grow ?

This session is more a place holder to have a panel with representative of Drupal User Groups and DA to share experiences and see what works and doesn't works.

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.

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

June 2010 we took a bold leap as a new company and decided to spend part our summer developing an Open-Source Internet Curriculum. We partnered with COSOLA-MACILE, a non-profit organization focused on K-12 education in less advantaged communities.

In July, we are travelling to Itabo, Dominican Republic to teach 6th-12th grade students and teachers about the Internet, Open-Source technology and Drupal, using Drupal Gardens as the primary teaching tool. The Pilot Program will run for approximately 2-weeks as an after school program open to interested MACILE participants.

Architecturing the way content editor will be able to manage the content on their site is one of the most important parts of building a web site.

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!

Drupal comes with a lot(!) of predefined markup & css.
Modules are adding styles and markup to the themes and so themers have limited control over whats going on inside the theme - that works well for some themers - others not so much.. or to put in other words:

"WTF does all this bib markup do in my bib site - aaargh for >>--bib--<< sake, Gimme lean mean mother >>--bib--<< 'ing markup"

This session is all about controlling and cleaning up the markup.