Calendar

The State of Drupal

dries — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:07:29 +0000

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to-do

Drupal 101

jeffnoyes — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:30:07 +0000

This session will orient people on how to get started with Drupal. We'll address installation using the Acquia Drupal Stack installers, then dive into some fundamentals such as:

- how does Drupal work (at a very high level)
- how do you begin to build a site. Adding pages, inserting navigation
- how do create roles and grant privileges
- how do you extend Drupal's features (finding and installing modules)
- how do you create ad's or specific call outs on your site
- how can you organize information on a page - like show a list of events
- how do you theme a drupal site.

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Jeff Noyes is a user experience designer for Acquia. In this role, Jeff helps Acquia ensure customer facing information is easy to use and understand. Jeff aims to accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to its advancement and helping brand new users get up to speed.

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

Intro to the Field API for Module Developers

bjaspan — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:34:23 +0000

Drupal 7 includes the new Field API which provides "CCK functionality" in core. The Field API supports attaching custom data fields to nodes, users, remote data objects, and any other type of entity. This session introduces the Field API for module developers and shows how it differs from Drupal 6's "hook_nodeapi" approach.

Speaker bio:

Barry Jaspan has been a Drupal contributor and core developer for over three years. He developed the Schema API and is the team leader for Field API. He is a Principal Engineer at Acquia, Inc. and is an entrepreneurially-minded computer programmer with a strong focus on computer security and privacy. Prior to Acquia, Barry created interMute, the first commercial web annoyance blocker, and Spamnix, a spam-blocking product. Barry is a maniacal whitewater kayaker and rock climber and generally spends his time wherever rocks, water, and gravity meet.

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.

More than search: Apache Solr changes the way you build sites

pwolanin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:40:23 +0000

The search tool can become the central interface though which visitors find information on your site - supplanting the need for extensive hand-crafted site sections and navigation menus and improving the user experience by letting them quickly find what they are looking for following a pattern that is natural to them. Unfortunately, a SQL database is not optimized to provide these sorts of features, so solutions built totally within the PHP/SQL framework have difficulty performing well for large sites or for multi-sites search. Indexing the data from site content with Apache Solr allows you to offload the computational effort and optimization to a separate server. We will show how Drupal integrates with Solr and how a search integrating content from both groups.drupal.or and drupal.org could look.

Speaker bio:

Last year Peter joined Acquia as a senior engineer after being a Senior Scientist at a bio-tech company. Peter spent a large fraction of his non-working waking hours in the last couple years re-working Drupal core and maintaining contributed modules.

Performance and High Availability best practices

bjaspan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:21:20 +0000

Note: the description of this session needs to be updated.

How reliable is your web site? If one server at your hosting provider goes down, will it take your site with it? How quickly and confidently can you restore from backups? You DO have backups, right?

Speaker bio:

Co presenters:

nnewton

davidstrauss

Amazon

killes

Damien Tournoud

Designing Grid Systems Does Not Begin And End With 960

markboulton — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:28:08 +0000

Grid Systems should underpin any well-considered web layout. Applying a cookie-cutter approach to this – but using a CSS framework such as Blueprint or 960 (and the Drupal 960 theme) – means you're cutting out a vital process in the design of your site: the design of the grid system itself.

This presentation will detail my grid design process. Throughout the presentation, I'll cover:

The typographic grid: its history, usage and application on the web
Different types of grid: modular, columnar, hierarchical, rational, irrational,

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