Drupal

Drupal for Designers

Daniel Schiavone — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 12:53:39 +0000

Drupal for Designers

By Daniel Schiavone on February 1, 2014

Drupal Camps are a great resource for people looking to ramp up their Drupal skills. Session tracks range from beginner to expert and spending a day or two at a camp offers an opportunity to exchange experiences with other developers and themers. I've been spending the weekend at Drupal Camp New Jersey. Today I gave a session called "10 Steps Not To Forget After Installing Drupal". My session followed a keynote given by one of the pioneers of programming, Brian Kernighan. Mr. Kerrighan is one of the creators of AWK and coined the term UNIX. He teaches a course at Princeton which focuses on the practice of programming. It was a tough act to follow.

Yesterday I taught a class titled "Drupal for Designers". The goal of the class is to give designers an introduction designing and theming with Drupal and hopefully encourage them to work more with the platform. The class works with the assumption that the participating designers have limited experience with Web Development. With that in mind I present two approaches to laying out a Web site. The first approach leverages starter themes like AdaptiveTheme and modules like Panels so that most of the work does not involve editing files. The second approach assumes more experience with HTML and CSS with the designer creating and editing their themes template files. With either approach I highly suggest using a starter theme likeZurb Foundation.

I'm not going to go into more detail here but feel free to download the outline. I also recommend an O'Reilly book with the same title, Drupal for Designers by Dani Nordin.

Drupal

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Web Design

Drupal Going Corporate?

Daniel Schiavone — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:12:06 +0000

Drupal Going Corporate?

By Daniel Schiavone on March 8, 2011

n 2009 DrupalCon DC had 1400 attendees. This year there are around 4,000 attending in Chicago. Growth around Drupal has been explosive to say the least. 1.7% of web sites are built with Drupal. How does a community based project like Drupal maintain a vibrant, fresh community while scaling to enterprise proportions? How does an open source project manage this kind of growth?

During this morning's DrupalCon keynote Dries Buytaert, the inventor of Drupal, answered this question introducing a middle management layer into the maintainers organizational structure. It seems there's no avoiding the corporate org chart. Coincidentally, I had grabbed Clay Shirky's book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” to read on the plane and just read a section describing the history of the corporate org chart. I hadn't really looked closely at the conference schedule so I didn't know that Shirky is tomorrow's keynote speaker. I'm curious what he thinks.

There is a certain sadness seeing an idealistic, scrappy, pure open source project like Drupal growing up. But after hearing about the challenges releasing the latest version I completely understand. Other large open source projects like Linux have had to adopt similar structures. Even in my son's preschool you see how hierarchies natural appear in human endeavors. Ironic that while Drupal helps organizations become organic its success forces it to become more hierarchal.