May 2011

Accessibility features should not scare 90-year old women

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

Let me just start by saying that I really don’t believe I should be blamed for the very odd experience I had when I tried to use the restroom at the restaurant we were at tonight; I certainly was not trying to scare a 90-year old woman, and I did not deserve to be lectured by her daughter.

Also, I think there is a funny analogy to web accessibility in this story.

Drupal primary menus used for top navigation dropdowns and sidebar local navigation

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

On a site I am working on, the theme is Acquia Prosper. The Primary Menu for the top navigation uses Superfish dropdowns if you turn them on. If you want a menu item to have a dropdown, you need to make sure that menu item is set to Expanded.

However, in many situations, you will also use the Primary menu for local navigation, so users can easily see what section of the site they are in, what page they are on and what other menu items are in that section.

Angie Byron, "Getting Involved in the Drupal Community": Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011 Keynote

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

DrupalCamp Twin Cities 2011 began with a keynote by Angie Byron, known in the Drupal community as @webchick. If you’re not familiar with her awesomeness, here is a bit about her:

Angie is on the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association, and the core maintainer for the just-released Drupal 7. Known simply as "webchick" on drupal.org, she led Drupal’s participation in Google Summer of Code and Google’s Highly Open Participation (GHOP) programs, and guided Lullabot’s collaboration on O’Reilly’s first Drupal book, Using Drupal.

A sought-after lecturer on a variety of topics, especially women in Open Source, she is the featured cover story of April’s Linux Journal.

Her topic for the keynote was "Getting involved in the Drupal Community." The room was packed: even her mom came! She’s a native Minnesotan and grew up in Rochester. So it’s no wonder that she is awesome.

Here’s a bit of what she had to say:

"Data migration for Drupal 7," Ken Rickard: Twin Cities Drupal Camp 2011

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

At Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011, I attended the session “Data Migration for Drupal 7,” by Ken Rickard of palantir.net. Ken is a core contributor, a co-author of the book Drupal 7 Module Development. He has worked on a number of important migration efforts, and is known as the migration expert at Palantir. This included some complicated migrations for ForeignAffairs.com and Grinnell College.

Here is the session description:

We’ll take an in-depth, technical look at the challenges of migrating external data into Drupal. Working from a live example, we'll use Drupal 7’s Migrate module to pull data into a Drupal site.

Here are my notes:

"The new Views interface for Drupal 7," David Rothstein: Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

Views is a super-powerful way to use all of your Drupal data in multiple ways. But it gets complicated quickly. So I of course had to attend the session at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011 on “The new Views user interface: How it works and how it was made,” led by David Rothstein.

The session description was:

Recently, the Drupal 7 version of the Views module got an entirely new user interface, thanks to a months-long partnership between designers and engineers working for Drupal Gardens and major Views contributors from the rest of the Drupal community. Working together, we revamped almost every part of the interface, with the goal of exposing the most common functionality in easy-to-use "wizards" while still preserving the full power of the module for advanced users. The result is a totally new experience for site builders who are using Views to build sites in Drupal 7.

  • Go over the new Views interface and demonstrate how to use it, as well as give some background on the process by which it was made.
  • Discuss the interface from the perspective of new usability patterns introduced in Drupal 7 core (highlighting places where it follows those patterns and places where it creates new ones), which should be useful for anyone interested in making usability improvements to other Drupal 7 contributed modules.
  • Talk about lessons learned from the process of doing a design-driven overhaul of an extremely popular Drupal module.

Here are my notes:

"Developing for Views," Aaron Couch: Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

If I have a Drupal headache, there is a good chance I am working in Views. Views gives you all the power of the universe, as it is an interface to approximate how SQL queries works. However, when you get into the weeds with things like arguments and relationships, things get complicated: fast.

Thankfully, at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011, Aaron Couch presented a session on “Developing with Views.”

Session description:

"Mobile Web Development with Drupal", Maksim Pecherskiy: Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

Nearly half of all website visits now come from mobile devices rather than from traditional desktops and laptops. So developing a Drupal site without considering mobile is now impossible. At Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011, Maksim Pecherskiy presented a session on “Mobile Development with Drupal.”

Maksim went to DePaul University, then did two years of freelancing. He has done mobile work both with and without Drupal. Now he is at allplayers.com

Here is the session description:

Mobile web consumption is on the rise. Of the 4 billion mobile phones in use around the world, over 25% are smartphones, and over 75% are sms capable. By 2014, mobile internet usage is expected to overtake desktop internet usage. Numerous people today already access the internet exclusively on their smartphones and do not own a desktop/laptop. (dotMobi)

As Drupal developers, designers and themers, it's foolish for us to continue to assume that our work will only be viewed on a laptop or a desktop screen.

Today’s website must deliver a tailored experience to the mobile web user that utilizes unique capabilities only available on such a device—geolocation, screen rotation, etc. Furthermore, this experience must be just as flawless as it is on their full size device. The mobile user expects personalization, interactivity, and most likely will not be paying full attention to your web app as he / she is using it.

The following topics will be covered:

  • What does a user expect when using a mobile site / web application?
  • Planning your mobile web site and its content (either a from scratch mobile site or an add-on to an existing site)
  • A classification of different devices and their capabilities
  • Technical challenges and how to work around them
  • Unique feature sets of mobile devices and how to use them to their full potential
  • Device Detection
  • Mobile web development tools
  • Drupal modules for mobile web

My notes from the session follow after the break.

"Responsive Design and Drupal," Jeremiah Davis: Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

One of the most important new techniques in web design is responsive design, which was introduced by Ethan Marcotte, an unstoppable robot ninja and one of my favorite people working on the web.

Since I work primarily with Drupal, I have struggled with how to integrate these new techniques with Drupal. Thankfully, Jeremiah Davis of Advantage Labs gave a presentation on “Responsive Design and Drupal” at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011.

Here is the session description:

We might not have flying cars yet, but we sure have a lot of fun technology that just a few decades ago you would have only seen in science fiction. We’re constantly jacked into everything and everyone through the internet—through our desktops, laptops, smart phones and tablets. There’s a device for every occasion.

As exciting as this all is, providing a good user experience across all of these devices presents a new challenge for designers. How do you design a site that will provide a good experience on the tiniest smart phone to giant desktop displays and everything in between?

In this session we'll talk about a relatively new technique, responsive design. We’ll talk about how this provides one solution for changing the user experience to suit the device. We’ll go over some of the techniques used, the pros and cons, and demonstrate how you can apply these techniques to your Drupal theme.

My notes follow after the break.

"Become a Panels rockstar in just one day," Will Jaspers: Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

Panels is one of those very important Drupal modules that many people use: not quite as common as Views or CCK, but it’s up there. Panels allows you to place content in various areas beyond the default regions in a Drupal theme, to put a complex multi-column layout in your content area, for example. To this point, I have not learned how to use Panels, but at Drupa Camp Twin Cities 2011, Will Jaspers gave a presentation on how to “Become a Panels rockstar in just one day.” Here is the session description:

Panels is a fantastic module which provides much needed flexibility to aggregate content from varying sources and help users and administrators alike use and re-purpose the information your website provides.

Assuming we can cover all of this in just one hour, you’ll learn:

  • What a Panel, a Region and a Pane are.
  • How to use the Panels Editor
  • How to put custom content into a Pane
  • How to use Contexts and Relationships
  • How to put views into your panels
  • How to make your Views re-usable for Panels
  • How to use the Page Manager
  • How to make Custom Access Rules
  • How to use Views as Contexts
  • A few themes that provide custom layouts
  • How to code your very-own layout plugin
  • How to use Panel layouts in Views

My notes on the session are available after the break.

"Enterprise-Level Drupal," Jason Burnett: Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

I have worked with large sites that have become completely bogged down. The next time I launch a large site with Drupal, I want to make sure that does not happen. So to learn how, I attended a session on “Better, Faster, Stronger: Designing Large / Enterprise-Level Drupal Environments” by Jason Burnett at Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011. Jason is director of infrastructure for NeoSpire, a hosting company.

Here is the session description.

Power and performance are key deliverables for any enterprise or large organizational website and Drupal is no exception. The goal of this session is to help you understand what a highly available environment consists of so that you can avoid the common mistakes and pitfalls when designing a highly available and scalable architecture to support Drupal.

My notes follow after the break.

Drupal Camp Twin Cities 2011 roundup

Submitted by Marc Drummond on

I attended Drupal Camp Twin Cities May 20 and 21, 2011: what a great experience!

Like many, I taught myself Drupal through books, online tutorials and the school of hard knocks. While I’ve been at this for three years or so, I haven’t met with all that many fellow Drupalers. I attended the Drupal 7 launch party in Minneapolis, so there were a few familiar faces at Drupal Camp, and now I’ve made a few more. I’m hoping to get more involved in the Drupal community, and Drupal Camp was a great way to get started.