Design and Usability

* As technology advances, it is more important than ever to code with web accessibility in mind. Web accessibility measures help users with disabilities related to limitations of vision, hearing, learning, cognition, and motor skills to use the web effectively.

Designing web pages as static images is usually a time-consuming exercise and produces a lie we tell ourselves and our clients. We're not designing flat graphics. Our work is dynamic, and needs to be seen and evaluated as early and often as possible in many browsers.

What are designer and themer roles within Drupal? This panel will bring together Drupal professionals who focus on the front end. We'll look at recent work and discuss the techniques we use and the challenges we all face as designers and themers working with Drupal everyday. How can we work better together, with our beloved developers, with designers who don't know our platform, and what can we do to make sites better.

There are ways to organize a page before it gets rendered to the screen. The purpose of this presentation is to show what Drupal does out of the box (blocks/regions) and then show 2 alternatives that provide more flexibility (context & panels). We will identify the strengths and weaknesses of each and provide examples for situations where one is more suited than the other.

In this demonstration, we'll go from a Photoshop image to a working drupal theme in 60 minutes. We'll briefly discuss wireframing and prototyping and how Drupal can help with them, and we'll make a working theme using the Zen theme and the Blueprint CSS framework.

Drupal 7 is coming soon! (Dries Buytaert, Drupal project lead, said at DrupalCon SF that it should arrive between early June and Mid-September.) Haven’t had chances to play around with it yet? Well come along and I'll take you on a ride! I'll focus on the major additions like custom fields being added to core, great improvements in the file system, and some dramatic changes in the user interface. I’ll also cover what you can do to ease pain to D7 on a new D6 site you are developing now.

Drupal themers and developers who want to get literate in jQuery should come learn the basics of writing jQuery for your sites. jQuery makes simple hide/show animations (popups, tabs, expanding fieldgroups, etc.) and AJAX functionality easy to write. Come get started doing it yourself, or get a refresher on best practices using jQuery with Drupal.

It's no secret that Drupal can be intimidating to new users and to those less-familiar with content management systems. This session will showcase a number of different modules that help make administering Drupal sites more intuitive to those who haven't been hanging out on IRC since the 4.6 release. Use in actual sites will be demonstrated, and there will be time at the end for everyone to share their favorite "killer module" for usability.

You've installed Drupal, configured some modules, and added your content. Now how about your design and theme? We'll look at some techniques to help you overcome one of Drupal's largest hurdles: Having your site not look like Drupal.

There are many photo gallery modules and recipes out there so it is hard to know which way to turn. I'll break some of these down and provide some guidance and materials on how to create a great photo gallery.