Excited about Design 4 Drupal Boston

Since I live in New England, and I adore any Drupal social events, I am of course attending Design 4 Drupal this June! I'm excited to have another large event to meet up with and talk with other Drupal enthusiasts.

I am eager to contribute what I can to help designers maximize the Drupal theme layer, so I submitted three sessions: introduction to version control, sustainable theming and image upload for content.

I know that I likely won't do all three sessions (it would be wild if all three were selected!), but I thought I would submit all three ideas to see what the community is most interested in.

Version Control

For the introduction to version control session, I hope to get people excited about using version control. Many people don't understand how it works, and don't know where to start, so I hope my session will break that barrier! When they leave that session, I would hope they would checkout using subversion the very next day.

Putting a site's custom theme into version control is a great place to get started. A theme is what will likely contain the most custom code for a beginner developer, and it'll nicely skirt the issue of version controlling the database. Since this would be a basic introduction, I will not be discussing deployment and database issues. But feel free to bug me about them afterwards, or get me to do a BOF :)

Sustainable Theme

I have been spending all of my time on a new site (which is why I haven't been blogging!) that will be launching just before D4DBoston. This is a fairly large site that has been roughly one year in the making, comprising of about 8 different developers. My next session proposal will go into detail about how I developed a sustainable theme with Zen to significantly reduce the time invested in the theme layer, and help developers help themselves to create new sections that "just work."

I would argue that sustainable theming is a new concept, and I was only introduced to it during Drupalcon DC by Colleen Carroll of Palantir. It was a brief conversation, but merely being made aware of the concept opened my eyes and ultimately helped me tremendously on this project.

When I started working on the project, I noticed that the theme was not approached sustainably. Any time a new section of the site was created, it was just raw, ugly output of data. Frequently entire sections would break during development because a naming scheme changed which then also changed the classes. Because this website is being developed in an agile process to adjust the website over time according to the needs of the client, the site's theme was constantly needing to be updated. This caused a tremendous overhead for the themer, and a feeling of disappointment in the client when they would see something ugly on the testing and integration server.

In response, and inspired by Colleen's mention of a sustainable theme, I revamped the theme layer. I adjusted the recommended process of creating a sub-theme of Zen, reworked the stylesheets, defined a naming scheme, and gently tweaked some templates (which I should perhaps suggest as a permanent change to the community). I did that two months ago, and we've only had to make minor adjustments to the theme since! Sometimes, we add a new section and or view and don't need to theme it at all! That's the point of sustainable theming: it just works.

My session would use this theme as a demonstration to go over a new way of setting up a Zen sub-theme, structuring stylesheets, structuring how to apply styles, and how to approach modifying templates.

Images in Content

Last, but not least, I was inspired to propose a session about enabling user-contributed image uploads for content by my involvement in Meet Ups for the last half year. People getting into Drupal just do not know how to allow users to upload and add an image to content they are drafting, and they get frustrated because, "It just works in Wordpress."

This is not easy. Just peruse the comparison of image-handling modules documentation bravely undertaken by Hans Henderson. It is huge, and in many areas, it is just in an outline form because there is an enormous amount to write about this subject. How's the newbie supposed to even read this entire documentation (if it were finished), let alone have to do the research themselves.

This session will hopefully clear up the confusion, help people understand WHY there is no solution in core, or even one be-all solution in contrib, and then walk away with a few recipes that they can use on their next project. My plan is narrow down the vast multitude of options into a few recommended possible solutions and demonstrate the user interface. I will then also discuss their ramifications when it comes to design (or rather, preventing the breaking of your design!) and user experience concerns.

Hopefully these are sessions that are interesting to the community!