Theming, Design & Usability

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.

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.

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.=
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.===

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.

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.

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

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!