Designer, themer

Drupal theming isnt that hard (at first) - but after the first sweet feeling of geek stardom, the truth comes sneaking...
Some elements in a drupal sit can be a little tricky, unless you are willing to dig a bit deeper and get a little dirty.
so this one is all about pimping the crap outta your site, and in the process build up a libary of pure awesomeness

Agenda

• - a Ménage à trois - Theming understanding
  and theres more than one position...
• - the quest for a the nada-html template.
  Cleaning up the css & html and remain some of your sanity.
• - access all areas pass
• - this my son is the kingdom you shall inhert
  how to steal win the prince (or princes), steal the gold and get a kingdom for your self
  or how to use the build in inheritance (thank you zen)
• - forms vs. the themer
  round 1.
• - Pimping the menu
  use the source luke
  Menus and the art of theme function overwriting
  css based coolness
  imagemaps -oh yeah we old skool
  image based menus - the designers love em ...
• The land of milk & honey
  drupal6 theming

Goals
To show some of the possibilities that are hiding just under the hood of drupal, and a couple of approaches to sex up your drupal life, and give the universal answer to the question that more than once have been shouted out:
"How the F!"#" do i get this menu to look like that the designer gave me - why cant we just use plain text menus and be done!"
and go from : "aaaargh I hate designer I hate drupal I aaaaaargh" to
"woohoo Drupal is the sweatest system in the world - wheres Dries I wanna kiss that guy, and by beers for all in the community"

Resources
basic css ,html, some php & basic drupal theming knowledge, and not to offended by the words that start with F.

Overview

Online Presentation Slides

Accessibility should not be considered an option or an add-on. It is the responsibility of the entire team, from the designer, to the coder, to the writer, to the themer, and even to the business development team.

Agenda

1. Accessibility Guidelines & Drupal
   • WCAG
   • PAS 78
   • Section 508
2. Themes & Accessibility
   • HTML
   • CSS
   • JavaScript
3. Modules & Accessibility
   • For administrators
   • For end users

Goals

Fortunately, Drupal has a solid foundation for coding standards and separating its data, logic, and presentation separate from each other. This has greatly contributed to the ease in which to make a Drupal site accessible. But is it enough and could it be better?

Resources

• WCAG
• WCAG 1.0
• WCAG 2.0
• PAS 78
• Section 508
• Drupal Accessibility Group

Link to the slide:
http://quiddities.com/presentations/2008/08/drupalcon-accessibility/

Overview

Everytime I work on a drupal based project, I am thinking about users how they are going to add content, set up taxonomy, maintain site and perform other tasks without getting lost on their site. This session will try to showcase best practices in admin interface and I will try to show where rootcandy (http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy) project is at the moment and where it is heading.

Agenda

* Several scenarios how to make administration easier
--* TBC
* RootCandy theme/module project
--* RootCandy for developers
--* RootCandy for users
* Available modules that can improve administration

Goals

By the end of this session, attendees will see more possibilities in improving admin section and benefits of making admin section userfriendlier.

Recap of the conference, farewell until the next Drupalcon.

Overview

Coding standards matter. Why? Because they free the mind to get to the more interesting bits of programming. Programming is more than just problem solving, and it is best when you can contribute patches and modules which provide the most elegant solution. With help from the audience, we can share our experiences of successes, rabbit holes, and hitting brick walls (and how to get past them too). This talk is aimed at programmers of all levels of experience.

Agenda

* Creative: it's not just for graphic and UX designers
* Code Quality: standards, coder, devel, api.drupal.org, code examples
* Creativity Killers: deadlines and budgets
* Rabbit Holes and Brick Walls
* Resources to Help You Stay on Track
* Further Reading and Recommendations

Goals

After participating in this talk, people will walk away with inspiration to write high quality code. In addition, more experienced programmers may take heart when seeing a beginner show their first contributions.

Resources

Recommended reading:
* coding standards - http://drupal.org/coding-standards
* http://api.drupal.org

Modules:
* devel
* coder

Overview

The formal user tests at the University of Minnesota and Baltimore have got quite some attention. They also had a common bottom line: Drupal is quite hard to get into for novice users.

We want to improve this. But how can we make sure we really tackle the major issues? And how do we find out if improvements are really improvements?

Repeated testing is the answer. Make sure to find out how the user experiences Drupal for our own attitude cannot be but biased. How is someone who is not accustomed to the workflow and UI able to perform a given task?

And how to make user testing fun? I'll try to depict how this can be done utilizing the
Usability Testing Suite (UTS).

Agenda

• Tests in U of Minnesota and Baltimore: have there been reliable results?
• A bit of theory: how is user testing generally carried out in other projects and companies
• The Usability Testing Suite (UTS): A way to go?
• A plan how to encourage and organize constant testing

Goals

Find a way to make user testing an asset to Drupal. Just like code testing has got a key role in Code Quality.

The talk will have an ensuing BoF to discuss the further steps in user testing. If we could come up with a plan that feels feasible, this would be wonderful.

Resources

Usability Testing Suite
In dev state,
maintained by boombatower

Overview

Come up with a plan how to encourage and perform constant user testing in Drupal. The BoF continues on what has been said in the Session "User Testing in Drupal".

Agenda

• User testing is tedious, what can we do to make it more fun?
• The main problem is that in a test, you question your own work. This is unpleasant, because you might find out it has issues. Or is this no issue?
• One needs testing persons. How can one make it easy for them so they may participate in testing Drupal again? Who are the people we need for that?
• Generally two ways of testing can be done: completely remote, or with you directly watching the Tester. Which one is better?
• There is also the "big solution" (formal Studies like in Minnesota and Baltimore. We also need those. What role do they play, and what role play smaller ones?
• How can we utilize existing Infrastructure to minimize redundant work? Maybe the DROP program can be used and extended? Do the issue queues help?

Resources

Usability Testing Suite
In dev state,
maintained by boombatower

Some 40 Indymedia sites worldwide are now using Drupal, with different approaches to solve some of the general and specific requirements of their sites and collectives.
Other collectives are currently migrating their sites from other CMSs to Drupal.

Agenda:
* exchange ideas and updates face-to-face, sharing what's done
* Discuss and develop the survey
* discuss ideas for a basic install profile

http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/ImcDrupalDevUsingList
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Devel/ImcDrupalDevModules#How_IMCs_use_Dr...

Overview

Web design is hard. I am not at all a designer or graphic magician, but would like to see great themes on my Drupal sites, so I am continuously on the lookout for great templates to adapt to Drupal. Whoever professional you ask will tell you that building a website on an existing template is a bad idea and of course you should architect the look and feel and interaction of the website for the specific need at hand. Unfortunately lots of people just lack the professional resources. And starting from an existing template still allows you to tweak it further (if the license grants you to do so).

Therefore this session is about picking a template (the Modern World template from Solucija) and converting it to a fully functional Drupal 6 theme with blocks, menus, a screenshot for the theme selector and all live from the ground up in 45 minutes, instructions included. Make sure to drink some coffee so you can grok every part of this quick flowing live tutorial!

Agenda

* Starting from template vs. custom research/process/architecture/design
* Template licensing, what should you consider
* Downloading and starting off with the theme
* Several steps, while the theme will be horribly broken, but we keep going
* A glamourous end result
* More on licensing, how to contribute the theme to drupal.org or elsewhere if drupal.org is not applicable

Goals

Attendees will leave with a recipe to port existing templates to Drupal 6 and hopefully even contributing them to Drupal.org (but this last item will not be obligatory).

Resources

Also check out my blog post: http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2008-jul-22/i-will-teach-you-port-templates-drupal...

Fleshing out the plans is here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/12972

Looking for co-hosts!

example:
- do a card sort on the admin categories
- discuss the different 'dashboard' approaches people already use
- choose 2 options we want to compare / test

another example:
- let's pick a nice chunk of core interface text: labels, descriptions, help
- rework them for clarity, consistency and brevity.

BoF Usability Sprint Day 2

build prototypes: on paper, in photoshop and/or code
or: further work on interface copy, start documenting the copywriting guidelines we find.

BoF Usability Sprint Day 3

Test conceptcode with the Usability Testing Suite
Or work on concept some more, take it to the Code Sprint.
or: create patch for interface copy and start the guidelines handbook page on drupal.org