This initiative aims to bring unity to a system of disjointed output components (blocks, page callbacks, menus, theme settings, and more) and provide a standardized mechanism of output, new tools for placing content on a page, and a potential for performance gains amongst other benefits.
Drupal Architect | Alliance Life Sciences
Long term contract opportunity - central NJ
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o Creating technical solutions from business requirements
o Integrating new features into the existing Dural Architecture
o Developing proof of concepts for new services, ideas, integrations
• This is a hands on role
• Resource needs expertise in Drupal 6 and/or 7
• Knowledge of 3rd party hosting solutions, Java, JBoss, MYSQL or MS SQL databases
Karen Goldin | Senior Recruiter | kgoldin@alscg.com
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Removing region and position from block theming
In Drupal 7, not only do you have region.tpl.php in which there's ample opportunity to customize wrapper markup around blocks, you are also able to override block markup on a per-region basis via a block--REGION_NAME.tpl.php file, as well as alter any block variable based on $region within your THEME_NAME_preprocess_block() function.
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Blocks & Layouts (SCOTCH) Post-Feature Freeze Overview
The big picture
Read moreUnified approach to edit, contextual links, and overlay
Problem
“As a content author I want to make a quick change to a block on a page I am editing without having to wade through many levels of navigation or a sea of options.”
Read moreRegion 'types' in Drupal 8
As part of the Blocks and Layouts initiative for Drupal 8, we are decoupling "layouts" from themes. Contrib themes will still be able to provide their own special layouts designed to work best with the rest of the theme, though what we hope to enable for site builders is the ability to switch layouts without switching themes and to switch themes without switching layouts. Primarily what I mean by layout currently is what themes now do in page.tpl.php, though potentially, we'll be able to reuse layouts for arranging fields in a node.
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Designs for unified Blocks and layouts UI
As you may or may not know Blocks and layouts is a design problem that I have been working on for the better part of three years since I first started working at Acquia. Back then Jeff Noyes, Dries and myself were just focused on introducing drag-drop blocks to Drupal Gardens and didn't have a view to the wider problem of layouts because really at that point seven was not even out and it just seemed too big a problem to solve.
Read moreAnatomy of a complex path
There's a lot of discussion about routing going around, and to help clarify it, I'm putting together this example of a complex-but-reasonable case for the set of determinations a Drupal 8 site may need to make in order to fully resolve to a single router. I'm hoping that such an example will help bound the discussion and allow us to tease apart the appropriate separation of concerns for the remaining challenges we face.
Read moreWebmaster/Drupal Assistant (Junior Consultancy) | International Land Coalition secretariat, Rome
Webmaster/Drupal Assistant (Junior Consultancy)
ILC – International Land Coalition
Land Portal project
Rome, Italy
The Land Portal – facilitated by the International land Coalition (ILC) is the global gateway for land related information, aggregating information on land from multiple sources and building a specialized community of land experts from civil society organizations, governmental and intergovernmental institutions and academia. It is the result of a partnership of many organizations.
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Use overlay/modal when adding/editing and then returning to same page
A saw EclipseCG's session at DrupalCon Munich where he demonstrated the great improvement work he has done to Blocks and Layout for D8. I am really looking forward to be able to start experimenting with that.
However, the demo also showed a typical case for where we can greatly improve the usability, and UX feedback for site builders when, as in this demo, adding a new block from the library.
As it works today:
1 - Click the "Add block..." link
2 - The library page replaces the page
3 - Pick a block and you get to a third page
Hard to do site builder usability testing
The work being done by Bojhan and others in this group, as well as within the Spark and other initiatives is simply amazing. It will undoubtedly lead to better UX and usability for especially those that will work with content.
As a site builder I am very eager to be able to get more involved in this work. Personally I am most interested in helping to test the usability and UX when constructing these editing interfaces, and provide feedback on that. Especially since it is those interfaces I as a site builder will be using the most in my work.
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B&L - Prototypes
Summary
After many intense discussions on the concept model, we have a working prototype as a deliverable and would like to get your feedback on our progress. The current version of the prototype takes the technical as well as the UX challenges of building this for Drupal core.
This post gives background to how we got to the prototype, outlines some of the major concerns and gives a detailed description on the process we followed. With feature freeze coming quickly it’s likely we need to move faster on the remaining tasks outlined at the end of this post.
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D8 Plugin Webinar, TODAY! (July 11th)
I'm posting this a little late, and I apologize for that, but Commerce Guys is sponsoring a webinar today that is completely focussed on the new Plugin System that's been proposed for D8. I would love for as many people to attend this as possible, we did one early this morning for the Europeans, and the next one today is at 1PM EST. You can sign up by going here:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/359603478
Cross posting to core as the information is relevant there as well.
UPDATE:
Adding the video: http://commerceguys.com/webinars/drupal-8-plug-it-and-go
Drupal 8 Plugins and Plugin Type DX
The proposed plugin system that is a foundational component for scotch is in the issue queue and has been heavily reviewed by core and plugins developers. In an effort to satisfy certain DX concerns with the Plugin system, an example plugin type module (with associated plugins) and significant documentation have been created. In the hopes that we could illicit the opinions of developers who are not currently involved in the discussion, two issues have been created with relatively simple tasks outlined.
Read moreShould forms be arranged in layouts too ?
Hi there !
There is an ongoing discussion at http://drupal.org/node/1510532 on whether SCOTCH should allow forms to be arranged in layouts.
To sum up, this has begun because we now want the node form to be a 2 columns layout. While discussing this, we realized that SCOTCH could eventually be used to put form parts into layouts, instead of some custom form API / markup / CSS tricks.
Having this possibility would be really nice, forms could benefit from layouts in a lot of places, not only the node form.
What do you think ?
Twin Cities Drupal Camp - D8 Theme Sprint
There's a great event called DrupalCamp Twin Cities going on May 18-19, 2012 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Since the event is one of my favorites, I've signed up to attend and also will be organizing a Drupal 8 Theme Layer sprint on Sunday, May 20th (as well as during the camp of course!). The specific times and location are still TBD but plan on an approximately 10 AM to 5 PM sprint.
Agenda:
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Revisionable Layouts
One of the requirements for the LSD initiative is that layouts themselves be editorial controlled. This means providing revisions to layouts with the ability to move the layout through an approval workflow.
I'm not proposing we put this functionality directly in core, but we provide a way for contrib to "easily" add the functionality.
Read moreConcept model
We want to give you a quick run through our ideas and current state of research for the Blocks & Layout initiative. I am working together with Useradvocate and EclipseGc to form a broad understanding.
One of the first things I want to tackle is describing how we use "context", because this is one of the most common questions. A really quick way of describing it is that context(s) are the data objects that blocks depend upon, to determine when display (yes/no) and how to display.
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Key Definitions Analysis
One of the most important aspects of a major design process such as the UX for the D8 Layout Manager is to clearly define terms in a way that we all understand and agree upon. In particular, the word ‘context’ is subject to various interpretations as we learned at Drupalcon Denver. To that end, User Advocate, Bojhan and EclipseGC have been discussing some of the key terms in order to arrive at useful definitions. Below are the results of our discussions.
Read moreD8 UX Analysis – The IA Space Hypothesis
An ongoing difficulty in design discussions is finding reliable/agreeable words to describe or identify key concepts. Whatever label we choose for an idea may have different connotations for different people. The term ‘Information Architecture Space’ (or ‘IA Space’) is certainly subject to varied interpretations so I want to take some time here to describe what I’m referring to more fully.
Read moreD8 UX Analysis – Layouts, IA Spaces and the Principle of Definition-Usage Pairs
One of the key ideas behind the new D8 architecture is that of resources being identified by unique URLs. It sounds simple enough but, behind it, I think there are some exciting potentials for transforming Drupal’s UX strategy. I want to share some ideas about that kind of transformation here and I’ll tackle it from a few angles: ‘what is a page’; the principle of definition-usage pairs; and IA Space and URL semantics.
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