Beginner

nlindLondonSessionV2-notes.pdf

In the old days, moving to Drupal often meant converting static pages or templates to Drupal nodes. Today, it is rare that we get to build a site from scratch. Reality is that most major Drupal projects are now migrations from other content management systems.

Taking on such a migration is not a trivial decision for an organization. There is a great deal of complexity in the reasons for migrating, but the decision is often not understood well amongst the various stakeholders.

Intended audience

This session is geared toward project managers and managers dealing with significant risk associated with migration from a legacy CMS platform to Drupal.

Questions answered by this session

How to set realistic expectations with stakeholders?

How to document an appropriate risk analysis and mitigation strategy in regards to a migration to Drupal?

You got "attitude" from legacy CMS users? Strategies on how to best deal with them.

Workbench-London.key.pdf

Our clients often come to Drupal with expectations about the features of a content management system (CMS). In many cases, Drupal handles the features they expect. However, not all editorial tools are a part of Drupal Core, and Drupal has addressed these tools with various contributed modules. As a result, Drupal’s editorial space generally lacks a consistent workflow and interface.

At DrupalCON San Francisco, Palantir.net outlined the opportunities we saw for improving content management workflow in Drupal 7. This presentation introduces the outcomes of that work.

Intended audience

Site builders, architects, user experience designers, people evaluating Drupal.

Questions answered by this session

How do you control content access beyond content type settings?

How do you find the content that relates to each user and that user’s job (which is not necessarily the same as the hierarchy of the site)?

Can you simplify Drupal’s use for content authors, editors, and publishers?

Can you find that file you just uploaded and re-use it?

What framework exists that allows you to extend functionality for your content authors yet still providing a unified user experience?

This session discusses the contribution designers are making in the open source world and how they are doing this - and how Drupal can learn from this and adopt a better collaboration model for designers and developers.

I will examine a number of highly successful open source design projects, extract the essential points out these projects and then look at how Drupal might be able to use similar tools and ideas to fuel designer participation in the Drupal project.

Intended audience

Designers, developers, themers

Questions answered by this session

How do designers collaborate in other Open Source projects?

What motivates designers to contribute to Open Source projects?

What can we learn from other successul design projects?

What can we do to increase designer participation in Drupal?

Dev-Deploy-Scale-Sleep.key.pdf

Drupal site best practice workflow includes initial development on local workstation, testing in a staging environment, and a production environment ranging from a single server to a high-performance high-availability cluster. After initial deployment, future versions go through the same workflow with the additional need to run tests based on the current production database and filesystem.

In this session, I'll demonstrate how to easily develop, test, and scale your Drupal site through this entire lifecycle without losing your mind.

Intended audience

This session is for anyone that builds or deploys Drupal sites for their own organization or for clients.

Questions answered by this session

How can I get develop locally and easily deploy the site to a high performance server or cluster?

How do I seamlessly and automatically scale my production web site up and down to handle varying traffic, without downtime?

How do I keep track of multiple Drupal sites, databases, and files directories, each with a development, testing, and production environment?

How do I ensure my site stays up 24x7 even when one or more servers fail?

Who do I go to when I encounter an server operation or Drupal problem I need help with?

forensic-theming-drupalcon-london.pdf

The theme of your website has the capacity for beautiful, semantic markup...and also the hacky HTML soup. You can build a new theme by downloading a free theme and tearing out its guts--or you can learn how to become a theme surgeon.

Intended audience

Small business site builders who partner with graphic designers but have no idea how to make Drupal look like a design file. Intermediate themers who start with a free Drupal theme that looks "close" to the final site and then start hacking to make their theme. The audience currently does not use base themes and are frustrated at how complicated all of the code is. They are looking for shortcuts and some quick-fix solutions to make theming faster and more profitable.

Questions answered by this session

What are the key tools I need to use to make themeing Drupal easier?

How can I make Drupal markup less yucky?

Where should I start when building a new theme?

Yeah, but how do I theme *that thing*?

I want to see how you build a theme: show me!

of_constraints_and_capabilities_v2.pdf

In software design and development we often overlook the role of our customers in applying their own capabilities to achieve their goals, often creating solutions that are bloated, complex, and inefficient. We are also prone to look at constraints as obstacles rather than opportunities to bound and clarify the services we offer. By applying systems thinking, designers and devlopers can create idealized designs that deliver the most value to customers and businesses alike.

Here are the presentation slides and speaker notes:

Intended audience

Those who design, plan, architect, and evaluate software and digital services.

Questions answered by this session

What is systems thinking, and why is it important?

How does an idealized design differ from other types of design?

How can a mental model help in designing and architecting software?

Why are constraints good?

How do I know what my audience can and will do for themselves?

DCL-UMN-Usability.pdf

Three years after our first round of formal usability testing on Drupal 6, the UX team returned to the University of Minnesota in May 2011 to uncover usability issues and patterns for Drupal 7. After making broad changes in D7, it was critical for us to validate if we are inching forward in our goal. With this aim in mind, we tested eight participants and asked them to perform some tasks. All the participants were site builders with no experience with Drupal.

Intended audience

Attend this panel presentation if you are interested in usability, understanding the user experience and the usability road map for Drupal 8.

Questions answered by this session

How was the study conducted?

What was tested?

What works well and what needs improvement in D7?

How was the overall experience for our users of using D7?

What does this mean for Drupal 8?

contributing-without-code-drupalcon-london.pdf

When you think about contributing to Drupal your first thought is usually of patching bugs and writing new features.

If you are not a developer, don't worry! There is a huge opportunity to increase your understanding of Drupal, shape the future of the software you work with, and help out the Drupal project along the way.

Learning Drupal can be a difficult and frustrating process. Getting involved in the community is the fastest and most fun way to climb the learning cliff and learn to love using Drupal!

Intended audience

New users wanting to get more involved in the Drupal community. Long-time Drupal users trying to find an effective way to contribute.

Questions answered by this session

What are the benefits of donating my time to Drupal?

What is this Drupal community all about?

How do I get involved?

Where are the easiest places to get started helping?

What kind of community effort is needed to keep this project growing?

Final Presentation_for distribution.pdf

This session will cover:

• Methods to flush out requirements and uncover both good and bad ideas
• Tools and methods to accelerate user interface design
• Tools and methods to test designs for accuracy and measure for continued improvement

All of the above will provide you with tools and processies to ensure that you are both building to meet your customers needs by making informed design decisions, and getting better over time.

Intended audience

Designers looking to learn to accelerate their artform Developers looking to include design, or some of it's user centered practices into their artform Business or product owners looking to build products that map to user needs and improve over time

Questions answered by this session

How can I make sure that my work improves the product I'm working on?

How can I weed out bad ideas and focus on good ones? What processes can I put into place to validate my thinking?

What tools can help me during the lifecycle of concept to creation?

How can I accelerate my design practice while including feedback from my peers and users?

How is Acquia applying this to Drupal. What are we doing to ensure our contributions are good ones?

Recently, I received an email invite for a webinar on mobile device development. I tried to sign up via my iphone, but was told that my mobile device wasn’t supported. True story.

Intended audience

Front-end developers, designers, site builders and even decision makers will find this session essential in understanding the Drupal mobile landscape.

Questions answered by this session

What does “mobile context” mean?

What are the performance implications of mobile devices?

Which mobile technique is better?

What Drupal modules will help you build websites for mobile?

How does Drupal’s low cost of failure help all of us?