Designers and Information Architects

Principles are important. They ensure consistent and fair decision making and they set objectives for us all to work towards. Most of all, they keep us honest.

We've been looking at establishing a set of principles that encapsulate our intentions in this initiative and give designers a strong story of Drupal. It would be great to get some feedback on the principles we have been working on.

To scope this discussion - this is about our new core theme for Drupal 8 and who it will serve, and how they will use it.

Its not possible to design and build something that will suit everyone, so we have been working on narrowing it down to identify who might use our new core theme and what their needs might be.

I have expanded on this and tried to think about skill-sets, constraints, features and what type of sites might they be building.

Drupal core's menu module provides “strict hierarchical” information architecture with its menu system. Menu module currently provides just 3 ways to navigate that strict hierarchy:

1. Breadcrumbs output to the $breadcrumbs variable in page.tpl.php
2. Blocks containing full menu trees that can be navigated by clicking into deeper levels of the menu.
3. A list of links that represent a single level of a menu tree. Output to the $main_menu and $secondary_menu variables in page.tpl.php

Did I forget anything?

Please check: http://www.drupal-rocks.com/Drupal-Tutorials-and-News/drupal-news-select...

Thanks !!!

Just launched !!!
It´s a Community- and Tutorial-Website dedicated to Drupal 7 for Administrators, Content-Administrators, Designers and Non-Programmers which want to create a website with the new Drupal 7. Support, critics and links are welcome.

Launchdate: 2011-01-07
Contentupdates: in progress
Languages: mostly english, but german articles will follow

If I build a Theme that uses no PHP or GPL'd JavaScript but does incorporate PERL code in the template would that PERL code need to be GPL'd?

I realize of course this would mean that the hosting installation would have to have PERL enabled on their server (not a normal Drupal setup) but I don't think that is the same as "requiring a 3rd party proprietary program" since PERL is open source and quite common on many hosting services.

There has been much discussion through the years about the automatic GPL status of Themes and Modules, and I will weigh in on that topic itself in another post (see the bottom of this post). But for now suffice it to say that I see an argument in favor of requiring GPL for Modules but I see a very different and very compelling argument in favor of excluding Themes from the GPL mandate. This post is to address a pre-cursor to that argument ...

Hello, we are actively doing QA testing and a number of design issues have arisen. We have dedicated implementation resources, and themers who are helping but we need help translating design issues into actionable improvements. This is the beginning of ongoing design improvements that we will be constantly deploying on Drupal.org.