Round table discussion

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

At Drupal for NGOs in London, UK, strong interest was expressed in sharing development practices for Drupal development.

So let's do it!

We'd like to share some of our experiences and ideas with you, and find out how you guys deal with things like auto-deployment, developmen-staging-live syncing issues and the use of version control systems to protect and distribute your work.

Agenda

* We'll share with you our workflow and development best practices
* Hopefully you guys will share yours!

Goals

We hope everyone will walk away with more tools and techniques for deploying, and maybe come to some kind of agreement on best practices for Drupal workflow.

All in all I think this could be a very productive session.

Resources

We require no resources, but we might print out a little write-up regarding our experiences and techniques to hand out during the session.

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

This is a BoF for librarians and library technologists.

Agenda

* What libraries need from Drupal
* What libraries and librarians bring to Drupal
* Version migration issues and challenges
* Integrating with library systems

Overview

"How do you keep your priorities straight when there's so much to learn and so much work to be done?"

A story is being told by the Drupal community, and you're a part of it whether you know it or not. As a Drupal user, developer, or advocate, you are learning what Drupal is all about and how the community around it operates. You're understanding the community goals and desires. You're figuring out where you fit into the big picture and trying to be productive, earn a living, and have fun doing it.

But wait... didn't you have a life before coming to Drupal or diving into a fast-paced, time intensive industry? What happened to all those hours you used to have, or have you not seen them in so long you don't remember what you'd do if you had them again? What is your story and how does it mix and mingle with the community's? How do you want it to?

This session will be devoted to briefly covering the idea of metanarratives (or worldviews), thinking about our own, and thinking about the way ours mix with the "community" (as ambiguous as that is). Being convinced of your own values, beliefs, and distinctives is the first step toward not losing them along the way as you engage with the exciting, global Drupal world.

Or maybe... you don't consider that a bad thing at all. : )

The BoF will be an informal discussion moderated but not dominated by me. I'm interested in folks who know more about the topic showing up and pitching in, and I'm interested in helping people maintain their pursuit of who they want to be apart from and engaged with their work environment and the global Drupal community.

Should the BoF not materialize (since there's so much other cool stuff going on), I'd be more than happy to broach the topic over dinner or drinks on the town.

Agenda

* Define metanarrative/worldview with examples.
* What is yours?
* What would you say is "Drupal's"?
* Gauging your engagement with the Drupal story.
* Understanding how to communicate with others who are more or less engaged than you.

Goals

The goal is to have a little bit of fun thinking thinking outside the code. Attendees should be willing to take part in the discussion or at least not get bored listening to others talk. The goal is not to confront the way people are engaging with the Drupal story, but to spend some time focusing on the unconscious decisions we make that have very real, long term effects on the things we do and accomplish.

(Disclaimer: I do approach the topic from a Christian theistic worldview, but this BoF is not purely interested in religious practice so much as it is actions, priorities, and values. Obviously, for many people like myself, this includes faith, but the discussion will be moderated in such a way that attendees should not expect a religious defense, debate, or Bible study.)

Overview

Local and regional communities are mostly raised and supported by a handful of people or even a single individual, while the Drupalcons are the result of many (not so mythical) man-months of planning, lobbying and teamwork.

We'll use this session to explore how people around the world are building the Drupal community on a local, regional, national and international level. Wel'll take the Parisian/French community as a starting point for our group discussion.

Next, we'll explore the different kinds of community events that are held around the world: their strengths and weaknesses, goals and results. We'll discuss how to start organizing these different types of event from scratch: the hows, the whys, the whos and the whens.

We invite you to show your battle scars and share your ideas and lessons learned. We'd love to find out from you how your environment, culture, religion or language influences your community and how it can inspire others.

Goals

* discuss the process of community building around the world
* learn from other cultural perspectives, and different forms of social interaction
* distill best practices, help avoid common pitfalls
* lower the barrier for new initiatives by demystifying the organizational process

Audience

Developers, testers, end-users, marketeers, analyists, ... anyone who wants to help grow the Drupal community on a local/regional/national/internation level.

References
Kristof talked about a great resource for management resources, you can find them at:
http://manager-tools.com/

Overview

Running a Drupal business, especially with responsibility for staff and balance sheet, requires a shift in the way you support Drupal open-source.

There is less opportunity to focus on drupal.org, and the result is that SME Drupal enterprises are often in the dark about is happening in similar businesses - even though the attitude towards open-source (knowledge sharing) has not changed.

To be effective, a company must make compromises: the move to D6 will come later, employees are not always open-source enthusiasts, and the lead developers need to justify what they consider best-practice (and document it) rather than 'just doing it'.

This session is based on a review of Em Space's current practices. We seek up to 2 additional companies (5+ employees) who are willing to share and compare.

Agenda

* Preferred contrib modules
* Using a code repository
* Managing live sites
* Ready for Drupal 6?
* Design and theming best practices
* Working with Design and Advertising companies
* Support and training
* Contributing back to Drupal

Goals

To get a clear sense of how other Drupal houses are using Drupal, to un-earth many varied and successful techniques.

Overview

The e-Commerce suite of modules (EC) is one of the largest parts of contrib. It is fairly hard to extend, and its main devs are having a hard time evolving it and updating it at the same pace as core.

For most implementers, EC is a turnkey solution, that can work or (too often ?) not, but is not often extended because of its complexity, and possibly the time zone issues with the main developer being located in Oceania whereas most Drupal contributors seem to work in Europe or northern America.

The goal of the session is to identify ways to improve the general experience with EC, by allowing developers wanting to work with/for EC to do so.

Agenda

* Understanding the general operation of the EC suite
* Knowing when to extend EC
* Knowing how to extend EC
* Knowing how to theme EC

Goals

The goal of the session is to enable wannabe EC devs to enter the game, and tempt others who previously renounces to come back to EC.

Resources

Having read the "core" EC source code (product, store, cart) prior to the session would probably go a long way towards making the session helpful for all.

Which version ?

I'm currently planning the session to be based on the (currently alpha) eC 4. Please comment on the proposal if you think we should remain on eC 3 (or for whatever reason).

Overview

The navigation menu, breadcrumb links, primary links, etc are important for users to be able to navigate your site. Is the way they work in Drupal 6 optimal for usability? Are there better default behaviors we could build for Drupal 7? Could we better accommodate non-standard browsers (e.g. screenreaders)

Agenda

* Fixes up to now (e.g. http://drupal.org/node/270917)
* Default markup
* Your suggestions and input!

Goals

This session will focus on Drupal core, not on contributed modules which can alter or enhance the built-in menus and taxonomy.

By identifying usability problems and possible fixes, this session will hopefully result in some fixes being identified to be addressed in core.

Resources

You should have used a Drupal 6 installation and thought about how you navigate using menus and taxonomy, and how you arrange or assign menu links and taxonomy terms.

If possible, think about "scalable menu parent choosers" and hierarchical select widgets. See: http://drupal.org/node/191360

Overview

The menu API underwent major changes between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. Now that it's been in use and modules have been updated, do you see areas of the API that need improvement? Bugs that are showing up? Performance concerns?

Agenda

• Introductions
• Developer experience (DX): could it be easier to program menus?
• Dynamic tabs
• Breadcrumb handling
• Allowed depth of the links tree
• What do other components of the Drupal framework need from the menu systems: e.g. semantic web, alternative renders, etc.
• Time permitting - Drupal 6 coding questions.

Goals

By the end, we hope to have identified specific features there there is a consensus around, and ideally have an implementation plan.

Resources

This will be a detailed, code-level discussion. You should be familiar with the menu hooks and page-serving mechanisms for Drupal 6 ahead of time.