myDrupal

As the Drupal Developer Days in Barcelona getting closer, we are nearing some deadlines that you might want to know about.

Sessions

We have a bunch of excellent session proposals http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/program/sessions/proposed that have already been submitted so far, but there is still plenty of room for more.

The deadline for session proposals is April 30, 2012, so you have only a few days left to submit one. Do this via http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/node/add/session (make sure you are logged in). We are looking forward to your proposal. Guidelines for session proposals can be found at http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/speaker-guidelines

Scholarships

The deadline to apply for scholarships for Drupal Developer Days in Barcelona is also next monday. Anyone who has not yet applied can do so online until April 30, 2012.

Our scholarship program provides financial support for Drupal developers, who would otherwise not be able to attend, so that they can participate in the Drupal Developer Days.
We provide this financial help for five participants.

Find all information on: http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/scholarships

Sponsors

We are still looking for companies and individuals that can sponsor the second edition of the European Drupal Developer Days that takes place on 15-17 June 2012 in Barcelona.

The event is the perfect opportunity to expose yourself to a technical minded audience and to show that you have a Druplicon-shaped heart.

Find the details of the different sponsorship levels on the website http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/becoming-sponsor and the great companies that already have confirmed their love to the event are in http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/sponsors

If you want to become a sponsor or have more questions, contact us at hola[at]drupal.cat or use the contact form at http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/contact

Volunteers

If you want to help organizing the event onsite or online, please don't hesitate in dropping us a line at http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/volunteers

• Drupalcamps Europe [international & english]

Start:  2012-04-26 19:00 - 21:00 America/Los_Angeles User group meeting Organizers:  redhatmatt syakely

Here's our two main presentations for this event:

1. Alex Smith and Shane Yakely will cover Backbone and Drupal.
2. Matt Young will present his findings on HipHop and Drupal as per requests from last month's meetup.

As always please bring your questions, comments and things to show and tell for the lightning talks.

If there is another subject you'd like someone to present on please comment on this node ;)

• North County San Diego DUG

Start:  2012-05-18 08:00 - 16:30 America/New_York User group meeting Organizers:  bendygirl Betsy Ensley sutch wabranty

On May 18th, Government Drupalers in North America will be chillin for good drupaly awesomeness at the Department of Commerce.

It's an all day event and the event is now open for partnerships as well as session proposals. YEAH!!

http://drupalgovdays.org

Thanks to the work of our friends across the Atlantic who pulled together the first Drupal Government Days event last year, we're building on their success and putting on a North American version this year!

We will have clowns, and roller coasters and cotton candy. Okay, no, we wont, but we will have drupaly goodness that we all love! So, get your session proposals in, but don't forget, you gotta register first and confirm your attendance, then, make those proposals!!

We are accepting session proposals now, but let me also take this time to announce a fabulous ROOM, yes, ROOM. We will have an all day dedicated SECURITY room. The fabulous, awesome and arguably the foremost experts for Drupal in Government Jason Ingalls, Greg “Greggles” Knaddison, and Mike Lemire are working together now to develop a plan for the Security Room to make this an event to remember! http://www.drupalgovdays.org/news/2012/04/10/security-s-word

We are currently being sponsored by Trellon and have Phase 2 and Acquia helping with all the planning and today, we've confirmed the partnership of AFGE. Yep, the American Federation of Government Employees will be helping at registration and helping to sponsor the event. All we need to do now, is add your company as a partner!

Case studies, sessions, Security Room and who knows what else? Well, you won't know, not unless you can make it. So, register to attend today! We'd love to have you!

If you have any questions, head over to our site http://drupalgovdays.org or email us at drupal4gov@gmail.com

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• Drupal4Gov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TSqtoAumpE - Re-imagining Drupal CRM Trellon 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APlfTPVzISc&feature=related - Drupal as a CRM 2011

• CRM

This past February Garen Checkley, Jen Lampton and I ran the Drupal 7 Usability Study at Google. We created a handbook page on drupal.org to share the exhaustive list of usability issues. While we learned about a lot of specific interface and module-level problems, we also saw broad trends that called for a higher-level analysis.

You can view this report here.

We organized the usability issues into four different layers: conceptual, flow, terminology, and interface. In this document we explain what each of these means, and provide key examples and quotes from users. We also propose a quick and concise up-to-speed aid that welcomes users on a new Drupal installation.

Garen, Jen and I will be discussing this report and showing a mock-up of an up-to-speed aid during our core conversation at DrupalCon Denver this Wednesday (3/21/12) at 1pm!

Download the slides from our DrupalCon presentation.
If you want to play around with the mocks we made using FireWorks, you can download the original file.

As we say in the report:
Drupal’s learning curve doesn’t have to be this steep; let’s shape Drupal to become more helpful and supportive for new users.

AttachmentSize drupal-google-ux-report-2012.pdf1.78 MB DrupalCon-Denver-2012-03-21-Presentation.pdf6.67 MB Drupalcon-denver-2012-03-21-up-to-speed-aid-fireworks.png865.3 KB

• Usability

Some of Drupal's Summer of Code success stories include:

Angela Byron (webchick) the Drupal 7 co-maintainer, Director of Community Development at Acquia, a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Famer and a Drupal Association board member. She originally got her start in Drupal writing Quiz module for GSoC 2005. Sumit Kataria, started as a GSoC student back in 2009 working on OAuth module, and now not only is one of the foremost experts in the Drupal community on mobile (look for his mobile apps for DrupalCon Denver in an app store near you!), but co-manages Drupal's involvement in GSoC. He works as a Drupal consultant with companies like CivicActions and Lullabot. Bojan Zivanovic (bojanz) became a preeminent contributor to views and contributed to EntityFieldQuery for Drupal 7. Gábor Hojtsy, the co-maintainer of Drupal 6, and the Initiative Lead for the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative worked over GSoC in 2006 to get i18n in Drupal core in Drupal 6. He is now an engineer for Acquia. Jimmy Berry (boombatower) was instrumental in the development of Drupal's automated testing framework, and he and his father Jim Berry (solotandem) were the first Google Summer of Code father/son team! :) They both offer testing-related services at http://boombatower.com. Lin Clark (linclark) created SPARQL Views, making it possible to query SPARQL endpoints from Views, as part of GSoC 2010. Her demonstrations of Linked Data capabilities in Drupal have been published on IBM Developer Works. She is now an independent consultant working data publishing and consumption using Drupal.

So if you're:

• a post-secondary student looking for an exciting project with a thriving development community and tons of smart people you can work with
• an existing Drupal contributor who happens to be attending college/university and would love a chance to get paid over the summer to work on the "Next Big Drupal Thing"
• a seasoned Drupal developer with some time over the summer, who'd truly enjoy mentoring and helping the next generation of contributors make Drupal the best that it can be
• a Drupal community member who might not have the time or coding experience to mentor, but knows where to find resources and enjoys helping others find them.
• someone with a great project idea for an improvement in Drupal that would be perfect for a student to work on over the summer
• a Drupal evangelist who wants to help grow the community by actively engaging students

...then there's something for you in Summer of Code! Read on to find out more.

Prospective Students

If you have enthusiasm the drive to work on something great, now is the time for you to get started! Subscribe to the Google Summer of Code group, look over the developer's guide and API reference, stop by Core Office hours and take on some new contributor tasks, find a Drupal event near you to get to know Drupal's amazing community, and take on a few bite-sized tasks in the Novice Issue Queue.

Most importantly, start thinking about your project proposal! Prior to submitting your application, stop by #drupal on irc.freenode.net or post your project ideas to the Summer of Code 2012 group to get community feedback. Your chances of getting into Summer of Code increase if the community has the opportunity to review your ideas and offer feedback to help you in improving your project idea.

We have already started accepting applications. For more tips, students should check out the Student Template Page.

Mentors

Please sign up to be a mentor if you have either experience with Drupal development or expertise in a particular area of interest (for example, newspapers, education...) and have some free time from now until the end of August.

To become a mentor,  join the Drupal SoC-2012 group and the sign up on Google's SoC mentor web app (now known as Melange). Please describe who you are, what your level of Drupal experience is, and your motivation for being a mentor. Your application will be reviewed by SoC admins (Chx, SumitK).

You can go through Advice for mentors page to find more tips on mentoring students.

The more mentors we have, the more students we can get in, and the more exciting projects of varying types we can accept.

Community members

Great project ideas are vital to attracting both great students and great mentors. If you've ever thought "if Drupal could be...", now is the time to turn it into a project idea. The project should be feasible for a Drupal-novice developer student to achieve in a 3-month time frame. Suggest a SoC project idea in the SoC 2012 group or help elaborating already proposed ideas

In addition, you can help review the existing SoC project ideas by providing students and other community members with feedback. Community members are in the best position to help students understand the finer intricacies of existing modules, and help their energies to meet the the priorities of the Drupal project.

To help the new Drupal family members, we need some existing community members to be active in #drupal-contribute on irc.freenode.net to answer student questions, point them to the correct resources, and people with expertise.

If you think this sounds like fun, be sure to get on to IRC!

• Google Summer of Code 2012

Start:  2012-05-01 18:30 - 20:30 America/New_York User group meeting Organizers:  moshe weitzman

We will be hosted by the MIT Drupal Group in Cambridge in Building E51 - Tang Center in E51-145.

Parking and Transportation:

After 5pm, there is an unattended MIT lot called Hayward: http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=P5

The Boston Initiative

We will dedicate the first hour of the meeting building a curriculum for learning about and contributing to Drupal core (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/194708 for more information). We'll be led by Kay VanValkenburgh.

Lightning Talks

We'll do lightening talk for the second hour of the meeting. Each volunteer will get up to 10 minuets to ask questions of the group, present your recent Drupal work, or other lead Drupal discussion. This is an open floor, and no preparation is required.

Dinner

After the meetup, some of us will continue the conversation over dinner at MIT's Muddy Charles Pub. We will likely pre-order some dinner so it meets us there. We'll take a count about half way through the meeting.

Please plan on bringing $10 to participate in pre-ordering food and some drinks. If you would like to sponsor dinner, comment below and organizers will reach out. You will be recognized at the meeting as well as given the chance to do a featured talk.

• Boston

Thanks to everyone who voted on Drupal.org ideas! Based on that, as well as a few conversations with some key Drupal.org infrastructure maintainers, here's a draft of the proposal for the board meeting next week, for your review!

(Original at https://docs.google.com/a/acquia.com/document/d/1_kTZrxPHArdDeyAZvV3-mj_...)

Drupal.org++

How the Drupal Association is going to make Drupal.org rock for developers and site builders

Background

In December 2011, the Drupal Association board held a two-day retreat to decide its strategic priorities for 2012. Two of the six priorities identified by the board were “Improve the collaboration tools on drupal.org and make it rock for developers” and “Make drupal.org awesome for site builders.” (Of course, this also means an un-specified third priority of “Make drupal.org awesome for businesses” so they can help us pay for this. :))

Board members Angela Byron (webchick) and Donna Benjamin (KatteKrab) embarked on some initial brainstorming and research:

1. Interviews were conducted with members of Drupal.org’s infrastructure and webmasters teams to determine their priorities (since that’s what keeps the plumbing running).
2. Drupal Association Executive Director Jacob Redding (jredding) was consulted regarding sponsors’ needs (since that’s what *pays* for the plumbing :)).
3. And finally, a public voting site was put up at http://drupal-association.ideascale.com/ to get community feedback on the Drupal.org roadmap. (Huge thanks to tvn for ENORMOUS help in gathering up and organizing an initial list of ideas to populate the site).

Through this process, we’ve developed the following plan for improving Drupal.org in 2012 that helps fulfill the needs of these distinct groups. And we will need your help to make it happen!

Quick Summary For Busy People

The Drupal Association wants to hire a development team to focus full-time on Drupal.org, supplemented by subject matter expert consultants where appropriate. We’ll start small (just reallocating existing staff to focusing 100% on Drupal.org) and work our way up from there, based on fundraising success.

Here’s the short version of what we plan for that team to work on:

Site builder improvements

1. Add ratings and reviews to projects, as well as other metrics, in order to help determine module quality and aid in comparing modules to one another.
2. Create a dedicated support section on Drupal.org in “question and answer” format, to help users get useful help faster.

1. Improve the case studies page
2. Revamped events section on groups.drupal.org to find user groups and camps in your area.

Developer improvements

1. Back-link commit messages on issues, to show a full history of code changes within the context of a discussion about the change, as well as a better way to catch bugs.
2. Improvements to the “Follow” functionality on Drupal.org to make it more usable, and provide additional details such as who is following an issue.
3. Turn project pages into groups to do per-project documentation, events, announcements, etc.
4. Drupal 7-based development tools, leveraging modern modules/practices that folks are already using on their “normal” Drupal projects (Entity API, Rules, Organic Groups, etc.), which are much easier to extend.

Business improvements

3. Improved hosting page
4. Revamped marketplace
5. Revamped jobs section
6. Drupal.org running Drupal 7, with responsive, mobile, HTML5 theme.

The Team

In the past, the Drupal Association has made improvements to Drupal.org “big bang” style: pick a near-impossible sounding goal, spend a bunch of money on hiring the community members who know the most about those things, and get ‘er done. We’ve had some huge successes going this route—the Drupal.org redesign and the CVS to Git migration—but this approach also has some major flaws:

1. These are short-term gigs, which means the Drupal Association is paying contractor rates for the work
2. When the money runs out (with a few very notable exceptions), the leaders of these initiatives tend to prioritize other things and their contributions to Drupal.org are reduced.
3. The Drupal Association is left with little institutional knowledge of how various pieces of Drupal.org work and fit together. The knowledge is instead scattered among 15+ very busy people.

Going forward, we want to change how we spend our money on Drupal.org, by building an internal team within the Drupal Association to work on Drupal.org full-time, supplemented by subject matter experts where appropriate. They will attack both big problems and quick wins, as well as support community volunteers who wish to scratch their own itches.

The team, as we envision it, breaks down like this:

Q1 2012:

1. Volunteer Coordinator / Project Manager
2. Senior Architect
3. Junior Developer

Q2-Q3 2012:

1. Add:

1. Additional Junior Developer
2. Allocate funds for 1-2 contractors

Q4 2012:

1. Add:

1. Design/UX lead?
2. DevOps Engineer?
3. Additional development/contractor resources?

As you can see, this is not a huge team, and it’s going to take time (and funding) to get it up to speed. This means two things:

1. The more we can fundraise and the earlier/faster we can fundraise, the faster we can hire folks and get rolling on the big things we want to tackle.
2. Regardless of how fast we can fundraise and hire, we will need the community’s help in resolving these critical issues. Not even the smartest crew of 2-6 people can cover all of the bases on a site as diverse as Drupal.org.

The Timeline

Key

1. #xx = Placement in top 100 in community voting; a lower number is more important.
2. SB = Site Builder
3. D = Developer
4. B = Business

Q1 2012

1. Bootstrapping: Hiring interns, winding down Neil Drumm’s work on DA priorities so he can focus 100% on community stuff, setting up basic project management processes (issue tags, documentation, reporting, etc.).
2. Low-hanging fruit: Analyze list of community priorities, identify items that are fairly straightforward and/or already have significant community momentum, and get them finished/deployed as fast as possible. Possible candidates:

1. #5 - Better showcase of Drupal websites on Drupal.org [B, SB]
2. #7 - Check for duplicates when posting nodes [D, SB]
3. #9 - Show user pictures on Drupal.org [B, D]
4. #21 - Move groups.drupal.org to new design [B]
5. Fix broken usage graphs [B, D, SB]
6. (Sort of #1) Download counts on projects [B, D, SB]
7. #18 - Improve usability of Follow button

3. Office hours: Establish “Drupal.org office hours”: a weekly time when community members can get updated on what’s happening, and those scratching their own Drupal.org itches can get dedicated help from DA resources for reviews, deployment scheduling, etc.

Q2 2012

1. #2 - Drupal.org to D7 upgrade [D]: Set up dev/staging infrastructure, hold sprint in April with key infrastructure team members to develop crowd-sourceable roadmap and get as much done as possible, bring on key contractor resources and continue working throughout quarter at least 50% of the time on this.

1. Other things that we could (don’t necessarily have to) couple with this upgrade include:

1. #4 - Responsive, mobile-friendly HTML5 theme [B, SB, D]
2. #20 - Enable group functionality for projects [D, SB]
3. #29 - Full staging environment for Drupal.org [D]
4. Project* revamp on modern tools [D, SB]

1. Completely redesigned and improved user experience for collaborating in the issue queues:

1. better workflow and UI for participating in individual issues
2. activity stream for individual issues interweaving comments, commits, edits to the summary, etc.
3. tracking of related issues
4. tools for organizing larger initiatives

2. Separate content types for the different types of projects (modules, themes, distributions, apps) that are optimized (with custom fields, UI, etc) for each sort of contribution.  I.e. the “projectness” is a field that you can apply to different node types.
3. More long-term flexibilty and simplicity by using the Field API for all of our collaboration tools, making them easier to extend and expand in the future.

1. Plan for Testbot??

1. TODO after BoF at DrupalCon

2. Medium-hanging fruit: Pick the next round of improvements once the easier ones are taken care of. Possible candidates:

2. #1 - Project ratings and reviews [SB, D, B]
3. #3 - Back-link commits in related issues [D]
4. #6 - Improved support tools on Drupal.org [SB, D]
5. #19 - Make events on groups.drupal.org amazing [B, SB, D]
6. #36 - Better Drupal.org marketplace for companies [B]
7. #16 - Dedicated jobs board on Drupal.org [B, SB, D]

3. Continue incorporating community-driven improvements.

Q3 2012

1. #2 - Drupal.org to D7 upgrade [D]: Complete the port by DrupalCon Munich. Almost 80% of time gets allocated to this.
2. Continue work on the “bigger” medium-hanging fruit as needed:

1. #1 - Project ratings and reviews [SB, D, B]
2. #3 - Back-link commits in related issues [D]
3. #6 - Improved support tools on Drupal.org [SB, D]

3. Continue incorporating community-driven improvements.

Q4 2012

1. Re-assess community priorities again to see where things are at, and develop plan/staffing accordingly
2. Finish up other “top 10” stuff that’s still hanging out (e.g. “advanced” things outside of staff’s current skillset, things that are better off waiting until after D7 upgrade, and/or particularly contentious community issues). Possible candidates (I can’t stress enough that these things are not necessarily going to happen [through DA-driven initiatives, at least]):

1. #8 - Automated Performance testing [D]
2. #10 - Donations for project maintainers [B, D]
3. #11 - Reputation/Badges system [D]
4. #14 / #27 - Better Git collaboration tools [D]
5. #39 - Topic pages [D, SB]

3. Continue incorporating community-driven improvements.

Aw. But the thing I want to see on Drupal.org isn’t on your list. :( (Or it is, but way later than I want to see it!) What now?

It’s only natural that with 80+ ideas submitted (not to mention all of those floating around that haven’t been written down or even thought of yet!) there are going to be some folks disappointed that their pet project isn’t on this list (yet!), or that other itches are being scratched before it. Since there’s so much out there, we really tried to focus staff time on things only the DA could do.

However, fear not! You can make changes to Drupal.org yourself, too! In fact, thanks to the voting site, you have a list of people who also want to see your thing happen. Get in touch with them, form up a team, get set up with a sandbox, and start crankin’!

The Drupal Association will be holding “Drupal.org office hours” every Monday at 11:00 - 12:00 PT  to support volunteers working on their own community initiatives. This is guaranteed, set-aside time for volunteers to get ahold of someone who can answer any questions you have about Drupal.org development, perform reviews of your work, and get RTBC improvements signed-off on and scheduled for deployment. We’ll use that feedback, balancing with the other priorities of the moment, to populate the list of weekly Drupal.org priorities that we’re going to work on.

Hope to see you there! We can’t do this without your help! :)

• Drupal Association

Over the last few months we have been working with Jared Ponchot, on redesigning the create content page. Based on our research and further discussion we chose a direction for which we developed more detailed designs.

The research primary conclusions that we applied are:

• Keep the current approach of listing content fields in the main area but look into more ways to group related fields beyond fieldsets.
• Rework the vertical tabs pattern into a less horizontal space consuming sidebar. (And look into applying a similar sidebar concept to other admin screens.)
• Move primary publishing options out of these tabs and position them closer to the Publish/Save actions.

The model below gives a good idea of how this works out in terms of placement of actual interface elements.

During this process, Jared Ponch created visual designs as shown below. Together with Bojhan and Roy each iteration was reviewed and researched further where needed. The sources of some of these iterations are attached.

We researched existing systems, contrib and various custom Drupal content creation screens, from which we brainstormed loads of ideas - we have a few of those drawings listed below.

Applying the design model

The first thing we did is introduce the concept of a sidebar that holds meta configuration that is now contained in the vertical tabs. To avoid taking too much space, a accordion pattern would work best. It allows for complex forms to scale vertically and lets short forms be easily collapsed/closed.

As you can see in the concept above, this allows for a whole slew of additional designs from moving the position of our buttons to showing one or more tabs in an expanded state from default.

The major issue we saw, is that this introduces a visually very heavy sidebar which distracts attention from the content area. In the next iterations we focused on placement of the buttons and making the sidebar less visually prominent.

As you can see, Jared also applied significant changes to the visual styling of the Seven admin theme.

Placement of buttons and publishing options

Next, we focussed on the placement of the buttons and publishing options. As noted in the research these two are currently too disconnected which causes major usability issues.

One of the patterns we noticed from looking at other systems is having the current publishing state (published, unpublished) of the content item close to the Save button.

This assumes that in the future we will have more states than just published and unpublished - we hope improvement on the content staging front will make this happen.

Above are various ideas around button placement and display of publishing options.

1. This example has the buttons in the sidebar, using a background effect you see that clicking save means you publish your changes. Using a dropdown here instead of separate buttons, lets us to scale this to N number of publishing states. The obvious advantage of this placement is that its directly in your view and hard to miss. Which is also the biggest drawback, its visual prominence distracts from the content fields.
2. Another idea we explored in our research is placing the buttons in the shortcut bar. This clearly separates the forms you have to work with from the Save action. This creates a dedicated space where you can expect buttons to show up. Systems like Joomla, Hippo, ModX (links are images) do this too. A downside is that it’s an unusual web pattern.
3. This example puts the buttons at the bottom and adds some visual styling to seperate it more clearly from the content fields. This is how we already do things across core. By applying a bit more distinct styling we increase its visual prominence. The advantage is that this is an expected pattern for many. The downside is it being visually less prominent in the layout of the page, likely out of the initial view port.

These initial explorations of where we could place these buttons seemed to favor either 1, or 3. We wanted to explore 1 further, to see if we could incorporate more publishing options - something that would be far harder to do in option 3.

Publishing options

You can see a few explorations below, incorporating more editorial workflow configuration into the area. Much of this was inspired by reviewing contrib modules doing this, for example scheduler and workflow.

One of the interesting things that we found is that we can bring these settings more together without requiring significantly more vertical or horizontal space. Even if we don’t get many content staging improvements in Drupal 8, contrib modules could implement the patterns shown above for scheduling, revisioning and staging content in the create content UI.

These explorations created the idea of separating the top part of the sidebar from the scalable accordion pattern. It made sense to consider the top ‘publishing’ zone as an area where very explicitly designed (customized) publishing options can be added. The second ‘settings’ zone could then make use of the more generic accordion pattern to capture all other items. This primarily to benefit the top publishing information to stand out more.

The explorations where followed by more detailed designs, where we explored how we could incorporate more configuration into this publishing area.

We concluded in this iteration that although there is merit to placing more configuration in the sidebar top it is also gets distracting. It does seem to make sense to explicitly organize this sidebar into two areas. The top zone for the primary publishing functionality, the bottom zone for the accordion with all the other settings and config forms.

We imagine that contrib solutions could then be configured to show either in the top or bottom zone. To become part of the top zone would require a very precise and minimal UI. You really want that area to stay calm and just not look like its all a lot of work. To add functionality to the accordion would allow for a bit more UI noise as most of it would initially be hidden from sight. This is not to say we should lower our standards, but lets be pragmatic here.

Extending Seven theme: detailed reviews

On top of these more fundamental iterations we also did a lot of smaller changes to the visual styling of Seven. Mark Boultons original design deliberately focussed on toning down most of the page elements to create a sense of calmness and introduce a clear seperation between backend (Seven) and the actual front-end (your site) which is to take central stage. There are some issues with how Seven styles certain page elements like the overlay close button, the secondary/primary tabs and the lack of button state styling for example, but we do want to maintain the established visual design direction.

For this we have done various rounds of more detailed feedback, from thoughts on the actual visual styling, to concerns from an accessibility and legibility perspective. Below are two examples of this type of feedback.

While working on these visual details we continued to iterate on:

• Reducing the complexity of the top of the sidebar. We started out with quite a lot of bells and whistles there but continued to move towards more static information to reduce the visual clutter.
• Placement of buttons at the bottom.
• Stress-testing the accordion pattern with contrib projects that add lots of options.
• Styling of individual form elements.

Where we are now

We wanted to get our final ideas out before Denver, to give our perspective to a lot of the discussion around our content creation experience. The proposal below is not final, there are still a lot of parts that we need to discuss and iterate further upon. On the other hand, we hope this post has shown that we have a solid basis to work with here.

Below is the latest version of our design for the content creation page. A .PSD of it is attached.

To recap, the main changes we propose are :

• Introduce a new grouping pattern in the form of a sidebar, to allow for easier scanning of settings and avoid the space-consuming vertical tabs.
• Placing the primary publishing options closer to the action of saving.
• Update the look & feel of Seven to solve a number of visual design issues.
• Introduce a more consistent pattern for actions.

We would love to know your thoughts. What do you think works well? What do you think needs further investigation?

AttachmentSize create-content-small.jpg83.14 KB 8_add-content_b.jpg217.54 KB 8_add-content_d.jpg230.66 KB placement1.jpg22.97 KB placement2.jpg23.31 KB 8_add-content_e.jpg233.99 KB 8_add-content_f.jpg243.19 KB placement3.jpg24.07 KB Joomla.png106.59 KB ModX.png138.58 KB Hippo.png169.96 KB 5-possible-workflow-states-small.jpg37.97 KB 5-possible-workflow-states.jpg54.96 KB Publish-settings.png29.81 KB sidebar-publishing-big-save.jpg36.17 KB review-jponch-v1-small.jpg62.24 KB review-jponch-v1-big.jpg284.07 KB siebar-detailed-review.jpg101.21 KB final-design-small.jpg127.1 KB Latest.jpg230.67 KB latest-iteration-contentcreation.psd4.05 MB publishing-horizontal.png83.63 KB

• Usability

Start:  2012-03-12 16:00 - 23:50 America/Chicago User group meeting Organizers:  Todd Nienkerk Aaron Stanush masleah

During the second weekend of March, tens of thousands of tech and creative geeks descend upon Austin for SXSW -- yet this year's conference doesn't offer an official Drupal-focused session. We've decided to take matters into our own hands!

Join us Monday, March 12, to confer, shake hands, and share enthusiasm with those in the Drupal community. There will be experts. There will be camaraderie. There will be beer.

You don't need a SXSW badge to get in, but you do need to RSVP via Eventbrite.

From 4-6pm, you'll have the opportunity to interact one-on-one with key players in the Drupal community during the "Ask an Expert" session. Got a burning how-to question? Ask away! Want to pontificate on the open-source philosophy? Talk it up! Want to hear more about how Drupal's affected these experts' lives and careers? Go on, pry!

The following Drupallers will be on all from 4-6pm for the Ask an Expert session:

• Samantha Warren, Design Director at Phase2
• Karen Borchert, Product Director at Phase2
• Scott Reynen, Lead Developer at Aten Design Group
• Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, Partner/Director at Zivtech
• Benji Davis, Project Manager at Zivtech
• Andrew Elster of Astonish Designs
• Diwant Vaidya of Astonish Designs
• Matt Heisterman of Astonish Designs
• Nick Comito of Astonish Designs
• Steve Williams of Astonish Designs
• Diana Dupuis, Director of Professional Services at Four Kitchens
• Ian Carrico, Developer at Four Kitchens
• Rob Ristroph, Developer and Systems Administrator at Four Kitchens
• Todd Nienkerk, Partner at Four Kitchens

The party starts after "Ask an Expert" at 6pm, and the fun lasts 'til they kick us out.

This event is made possible by:

• Astonish Designs
• Aten Design Group
• LevelTen
• Phase2
• Zivtech

With special thanks to:

• Four Kitchens
• GeekAustin

• Central Texas

Two of the Drupal Association's 2012 priorities are to make Drupal.org awesome: both for site builders and for developers. We want to hear from you about what improvements you'd most like to see on Drupal.org.

Please let us know your thoughts at http://drupal-association.ideascale.com/. You can propose new ideas, vote on existing ideas, and also leave comments. When we have the more discrete list of things we plan to cover in 2012 and when, we'll share it with the community for feedback.

Important things to note:

1. Please don't limit yourself only to big things. The more high-impact, "low hanging fruit" we can fix, the better! :) All suggestions must have a correlating URL on *.drupal.org with more information.
2. Voting on an idea here does **not** necessarily mean it will get implemented, even if it's one of the highest (or even *the* highest) thing in the list. We are using this tool as a barometer to find out more about what our contributor community thinks is important, so we can factor this into our prioritization process.
3. That prioritization process will include needs of the Drupal Association itself (e.g. DrupalCon & membership-related tasks so we can perform our other necessary functions), the needs of the Drupal.org infrastructure team (keeps the servers humming), and the needs of the DA's sponsors (keeps the money flowing so we can fund more improvements!).
4. Unfortunately, no, this is not a Drupal site. If this fact appalls you, there is an idea in there that you can up-vote. :) It does allow data export capabilities though, so yay!

HUGE kudos to tvn for a tremendous amount of research on existing ideas that are out there, and jredding and kattekrab for several hours of brainstorming. :)

• Prairie Initiative

We are inviting YOU, The Drupal Community, to join us for the first ever Blue Drop Awards!

LEARN MORE & NOMINATE YOUR FAVORITE DRUPAL SITE: www.bluedropawards.org
As Drupal grows, it is important to recognize the innovative people and companies driving our success and to promote Drupal to the world beyond the community. While the Drupal software has won many prestigious awards, the front-line contributors and companies rarely receive proper recognition. It's time we changed that.

Get ready for the first annual Blue Drop Awards.
On March 27, 2012, awards will be given in the following categories:

Drupal Website of the Year
Best Enterprise Website Built With Drupal
Best Business Website Built With Drupal
Best Marketplace Website Built With Drupal
Best Social Website Built With Drupal
Best Non-Profit/Education Website Built With Drupal
Best Media Website Built With Drupal
Best Personal Website Built With Drupal
Best Interesting Website Built With Drupal

Blue Drop Awards is a community-nominated, community-voted event. It exists to promote Drupal as a whole, as well as to honor the individual winners.
LEARN MORE AT www.bluedropawards.org

• The Marketing of Drupal

Hello Business Leaders!

we plan the Drupal Business Days in Vienna to become a very powerful event that allows you to get your Drupal business further!

On May 3th - 5th we will have three days of business discussions, keynotes, products, startups, pitches, fun and more fun!

Register at: www.drupalbusiness.org - We have several actions for you that give you the perfect possibility to get involved...

• Sessions - Tell us your idea, whom you want to see, or propose your presentation!
• Sponsors - Do you want to position your company as a business leader? Or you know someone who should do so?
• Media Partners - you want to be a media partner, write about or advertise the Drupal Business Days and get some attention in return?
• Drupal Business Associate - You want to be part of the organizational team and help make this event big?

If one of these points concerns you - get in touch with us via the contact form or at office { a } drupalbusiness.org !

More Info here: www.drupalbusiness.org

• Drupalcamps Europe [international & english]

Start:  2012-06-15 (All day) - 2012-06-17 (All day) Europe/Madrid Drupalcamp or Regional Summit Organizers:  pcambra rvilar

You can now register for the European Drupal Developer Days that take place from June 15th to 17th, 2012 at the Citilab training & research center in Barcelona.

At the Drupal Developer Days we are offering sessions, trainings, ad-hoc meetings, code sprints and practical workshops about the latest developments and techniques in the world of Drupal 8.

We are now also accepting session submissions. If you want to present in Barcelona, you should start thinking now about a good subject that will capture the attention of a crowd of mainly programmers.
The conference is targeted at Drupal developers with varying skill sets: from the beginners who just discovered Drupal to the experts that push the Certified to Rock meter into the red. The sessions should focus on technical topics.

Please have a look at the speaker's guidelines that we assembled.

If you have any questions, please use our forum, contact form or ping @drupaldaysbcn on Twitter

Keep a close eye on our website and follow the Drupal Developer Days Barcelona on Twitter @drupaldaysbcn, to stay informed on the latest details.

• Drupalcamps Europe [international & english]

This strategy document uses the Minimal Viable Product strategy, which you can read more about on Wikipedia.

General Overview

The Drupal 8 Mobile initiative’s goal aims to make Drupal the leading mobile CMS platform. Certainly, there are some fantastic contributed modules that already make Drupal a great starting point for mobile solutions; modules like Mobile Tools, Domain Access, Responsive Images, as well as a whole slew of new ones that have been released in the past few months. But in order for a CMS to earn the moniker "mobile-friendly", setting it all up needs to be easy.

Right now, Web development experts are building mobile apps and websites while looking for integration with existing CMSs. And they are having to build a lot of the tools themselves because there are very few mature tools. The Web development industry as a whole is still trying to figure out the best way to build mobile sites and Drupal needs to engage and become a leader as that work continues.

There are currently at least five different ways to provide mobile solutions:

• Native apps (code compiled to run natively on iPhones, Androids, etc.)
• Web apps (HTML5 and JavaScript-based apps running on mobile browsers)
• Mobile/desktop domain switching (parallel websites: one for desktop and one for mobile, with device detection to switch between the two.)
• Responsive design (a single HTML source that uses CSS3 media queries and JavaScript to respond to different device capabilities)
• RESS: Responsive Design + Server-side Components (a hybrid approach that uses Responsive Design techniques combined with a light amount of device detection to alter the markup before being sent to the user.)

Drupal, whether in core or contrib, should support all of them.

Now that’s a pretty broad spectrum of things to cover and they can’t all be included in core. But, to reach that “mobile-friendly CMS” status, what are the top issues Drupal 8 core should provide?

1. Web services for native app integration
2. HTML5 elements necessary for HTML5 Web apps
3. Ability to use Drupal’s administrative forms in mobile devices
4. All of Drupal 8’s core themes should be responsive
5. Front-end performance improvements

Fortunately, the first two points are already covered by the Web Services and Context Core Initiative and the HTML5 Initiative.

That just leaves the last three items for the Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative to focus on.

 

Objectives Responsive Web design

Responsive design is the hottest technique in producing mobile friendly websites because, relative to traditional mobile building techniques, it lowers the development cost for including mobile device support. Websites that only support large screens will become an anachronism, so converting all of core’s current themes to have mobile-first responsive designs is essential for Drupal to remain relevant. (Incidentally, the Drupal 8 Design Initiative, which is focusing on building new themes for Drupal 8, will also ensure its themes are responsive.)

Mobile-friendly forms

If users can’t create content or administer a Drupal site while on a mobile device, we have a serious problem. Those are the first tasks attempted by users on new Drupal websites. Much as the “ugly themes in Drupal 6” made a bad first impression of Drupal to Web designers, not providing mobile administrative solutions will leave a sour taste in the mouths of mobile developers evaluating CMS solutions. To complete this task, we’ll have to look at the complete stack for administrative tasks, including form definitions, form submit handlers, the Toolbar, the Overlay, and the Seven theme.

The target is 100% mobile-friendly administration via responsive design, but we recognize that certain pages, e.g., the permissions page, may require a dedicated mobile presentation.

Front-end performance

Lastly, performance has always been a priority for websites, but with mobile it becomes critical. Some studies show up to 97% of a page’s render time takes place in the front-end. There are a laundry list of best practices for front-end performance that will help mobile and desktop users. And I’ve seen several members of the Drupal community speak about these issues multiple times this past year.

However, when dealing with responsive design, the single biggest performance concern is image handling. The first demo of responsive design had over-large images being sent to mobile devices. While no single best solution has yet been found, we intend to leverage Drupal 7’s image styles to solve this issue.

 

Program tasks

Program tasks are defined in the following way:

• Must have (essential to success)
• Should have (significant impact to success)
• Could have (should be done, but are not essential)
• Won’t have (future functionality)

1. Must have / Critical Responsive Web design
   • Seven converted: http://drupal.org/node/1088792
   • Stark converted: http://drupal.org/node/1322794
   • Bartik converted: http://drupal.org/node/1192044
   Mobile-friendly administration
   • For all content editing and workflow related pages (adding users, taxonomy terms, menu items, new content, moderating content, etc.)
   • Review of the Toolbar
   • Review of the Overlay
   Front-end performance
   • Responsive images: As the layout is resized, the browser will serve the proper image size (“real” size, not height/width attributes) See Responsive image discussion for current status.
   • Optimized images
   • Sprites used wherever appropriate
   • Optimized css: Evaluate the CSS/JS aggregation process and adjust where improvements can be made. Offer more flexible JS loading options so Drupal can stay current as new tools arise.

   One of the first issues that needs tackling is determining a dependencies list so the critical tasks can be done as quickly as possible. For example, all mobile-friendly admin tasks are dependent on Seven being responsive.

2. Should have / Major
   • A “Mobile Guide” for how to make websites mobile-friendly using contributed projects. http://drupal.org/documentation/mobile
   Front end performance
   • Documentation of the use cases that css aggregation serves.
   • Documentation for how to optimize for other use cases.
   Mobile-friendly administration
   • Configuration pages converted (creating a new content type; adding fields to a user profile, etc.)
3. Could have / Normal & Minor

   TBD

4. Won’t have
   • Any impact on Drupal.org; See http://drupal.org/node/951114

• Core