Calendar

How to contribute to Drupal

Bevan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:06:28 +0000

Want to contribute soemthing to Drupal but not sure how? Learn how the Drupal ecosystem works. Discover what an issue queue is, what to do with patches, how Drupal and contrib modules evolve over time, where Drupal developers talk and – most importantly – how you can get involved.

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

At CivicActions, Bevan Rudge is a Drupal developer, software engineer and themer. Bevan is an advocate of FOSS, developer & contributor to Drupal core & contrib, member of the Drupal Association, local DUG enthusiast, usability nerd, snowboarder, mountain-biker, wannabe kitesurfer, wannabe sailor and beer-drinker. Bevan was a mentor to Jimmy "Boombatower" Berry in the Drupal Google Summer of Code 2008 project for a Usability Testing Suite for Drupal. Bevan was a student in the Season of Usability for improvements to node forms and presented on Scalable Theming at DrupalCon Boston 2008. Some of Bevan's other visible work includes the Witness Hub Map, DrupalSouth event & website, Just Cause theme, Rare Planet theme, ACLU TV series website, Feriana online fashion store, So Much World website, PHPlist websites and other projects. Bevan tweets on twitter, blogs at CivicActions.com and Drupal.geek.nz and works from his home in Christchurch, New Zealand. And just in case that wasn't enough, Bevan also studies computer science at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Stella Power, also of CivicActions will be co presenting this session; Stella Power joined the CivicActions team in 2008 as an Engineer working on a project funded by Sony to improve Drupal's internationalization features. She is the author and maintainer of several Drupal projects, including the popular Lightbox2 and FAQ modules. Previously, Stella worked as a senior systems developer and assistant development manager in financial transactions services companies. She has worked on a number of different projects, from billing systems to gift card solutions, and was lead developer on Europe's first Virtual VISA Voucher system. Stella graduated with a Computational Physics degree from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and is currently studying for a Masters degree in Software Engineering in Dublin City University. When not working or studying, Stella can be found in the ceramics studio or pursuing her passion for amateur photography.

Co presenters:

stella

Bevan

Here comes localize.drupal.org!

Gábor Hojtsy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:27:06 +0000

The Drupal.org site family just got a new member: localize.drupal.org. While it also helped pioneer single sign-on on drupal.org, its core goal is to highly simplify the localization of Drupal projects. As a central installation of the Localization Server project originally sponsored by Google Summer of Code, it is set up to offer text from the source code of projects released on drupal.org for translation on a web based user interface. It replaces CVS and the cumbersome release scheduling that was required to be done previously.

Speaker bio:

Gábor Hojtsy develops Drupal modules since 2003, is the Drupal 6 core maintainer and code gardener at Acquia.

Sustainable theming: How to take a vacation.

caroltron — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:22:45 +0000

We all want to take vacations, and we all want our sites to grow beyond without us holding its hand, or at least some of us do.

JohnAlbin and I will be co-presenting a session on how to think strategically about your theming so that it can stand on its own legs. At Palantir.net we strive to reduce the amount of bugs related to theming after a site has launched. It can be difficult to do, but with a little patience and planning you can build a theme that works on its own from a toolkit of design elements.

Speaker bio:

Colleen Carroll is Lead of Theming team at Palantir.net She is also the maintainer of the Austin theme. John Wilkins is a Senior Themer at Palantir.net and the maintainer of the Zen theme (among other things).

Co presenters:

JohnAlbin

Communicating design - Sketching your way to understanding.

yoroy — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:50:38 +0000

“Clear communication between web developers and their clients — and among members of the development team — is key to the succes of any web project.”

Where code is low-bandwidth and can generally be well discussed and assessed with words, design is very much high-bandwidth. You just can't discuss it using words alone. So, let's draw some pictures!

Through a case study of how I worked with a development team redesigning a community web site, we'll discuss how sketching can help in two ways:

Defining the right question to ask.
Finding the best possible answer.

Speaker bio:

Roy Scholten is an interaction designer based in Hilversum, The Netherlands. He's one of the people working on a better Drupal user experience. He runs his own small design studio at yoroy.com

Functional Fips: PHP basics for themers

emmajane — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:55:50 +0000

There are a lot of theme snippets available in the Theme Guide. There is not, however, a lot of information about PHP which is the language that makes up these snippets. If you're tired of copying, pasting and praying and are ready to understand some of the magic behind those snippets, this session is for you!

In this session you will learn how to manipulate and master:

The very, very basics of PHP and the popular theming engine PHPtemplate
Variables and tpl.php template files

Speaker bio:

Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a Web developer since 1996. She is well known in the Drupal community not only for her technical knowledge, but also for her engaging and humorous means of bringing Drupal to a wider audience—such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. Her wildly successful theming book, Front End Drupal (co-authored with Konstantin Kaefer), was launched this spring. Emma volunteers with the Drupal documentation team and blogs at emmajane.net.

Web Typography Fundamentals: From Em Dash to Hanging Punctuation

markboulton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:17:23 +0000

Typography is at the very heart of the web. Unfortunately, web typography generally sucks. This presentation will help anyone – developer or designer – not suck at typography. From Em-dashes to hanging punctuation, we'll cover simple fundamentals of good typography for the web.

What will be covered in this presentation:

Typographic Structure
Hierarchy and language
Whitespace and typographic colour
Typesetting on the web
Tables, lists and forms
@font-face and font embedding

Speaker bio:

Mark Boulton is a designer from the UK and runs the design studio behind the recent redesign of Drupal.org and Drupal 7 UX (working alongside UX designer, Leisa Reichelt). His life outside of Drupal consists of working for other clients (yes, we do that!) such as ESPN, Warner Brothers and the BBC. He also writes the odd book, runs workshops and speaks at conferences.

Hosting meetups, camps, and virtual classes: building the community that builds Drupal

Benjamin Melançon — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:24:11 +0000

Drupal has a fantastic tradition of involving newcomers, from all sorts of backgrounds, in the project. From IRC help and banter to mentored/sponsored projects to a vibrant local meetup scene, "the community" this helps build is a major reason people stay with Drupal and how it keeps getting more awesomer.

Speaker bio:

Copresenters to come; nominating yourself is welcome! Benjamin Melançon does Drupal development with Agaric, which builds powerful web sites for people who do things. Sharing code, ideas, and helping connect everyone and everything goes well with his personal goals of the economic justice, genuine liberty, and collective organizing for all sorts of progress.

Co presenters:

stella

ceardach

amye

Susan MacPhee

Functional Interactive Design

Laura Scott — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:04:49 +0000

Ever walk up to a door and pull on the handle, only to discover the door is push-only? Do you really know how to operate your clock-radio? Doors may be pretty, clocks may look cool, but when we have to actually use them, the measure of their design changes.

Same with websites. A website may be pretty at first blush, but can you find what you're looking for? Can you do what you want to do? Can you even figure out what you're supposed to do?

Day:

Day 2

Speaker bio:

Laura Scott is President and Creative Director of pingVision, an interactive design and development company founded in 2005, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura has been designing websites since 1995, working in video, film, television, and multimedia. Since 2004 she has been working with Drupal almost exclusively for web development. Laura has presented on design and technology at BlogHer 2006, OSCMS 2007 and DrupalCon Boston 2008.

Sharing content across multiple sites with Domain Access

agentrickard — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:16:05 +0000

We will take an in-depth look at the Domain Access module and how it can be used to support complex content sharing scenarios.

We will explore the features of the module and examine how they can be used to build sites such as:

- www.interlochen.org
- www.skirt.com
- www.rowelevenwines.com

We will concentrate on what makes Domain Access different from other Drupal Node Access modules, such as Organic Groups and Taxonomy Access Control.

Attendees should learn the following during the session:

Speaker bio:

I am a senior Drupal programmer at Palantir.net and a longtime Drupal contributor. I am the maintainer and author of the Menu Node API, MySite, Domain Access and Skeleton modules. I also co-chair the Newspapers on Drupal group and the Knight Drupal Initiative.