This week's Ventura clinic (aka Drupal workgroup/studygroup) will be at
Ojai Digital Dojo
963 W. El Roblar Drive
Ojai, California 93023
http://ojaidigitaldojo.net
Google map:
http://tinyurl.com/ojaidigitaldojo
Wednesday, June, 23rd, 2010, 7pm-9pm
This is actually what is known as 'Meiners Oaks' area of the Ojai Valley.
Free wi-fi, coffee, tea, kitchen access if you want to brown bag it. We can also send out for Pizza. There are organic market, burgers, Mexican food, etc within a few blocks if you want to pick something up.
No presentations on Clinic Wednesdays, just a small group of folks helping each other with Drupal questions.
Aimed mainly at newbies, but open to anyone with questions or anyone willing to help others find answers to their questions.
Comments
Small group, good discussion.
Not all Drupal Clinics are technical in nature. Last Wednesday, it was just Rob, Alicia and myself, but we ended up getting into a very interesting discussion about best practices for working with graphic artists, web designers, Drupal themers, developers and system folk. Sometimes this is the same person. Sometimes this is a team of three or more people. Often, the web designer handles graphics and creates wire-frames and mock-up images to help specify the site. Some web designers are quite skilled at HTML/CSS and even jQuery and may prefer to mock up in the browser. Many do not know much about Drupal and so often need help in understanding how to best work within the Drupal Framework. As a result, some designs are more difficult to implement than others.
Rob has a lot of experience managing Drupal projects. I do too and I have also implemented lots of Drupal sites based on a wide variety of design specifications and mock-ups. We both feel that the work-flow between web designers and themers can often be streamlined to improve project clarity and reduce unnecessary rework, while at the same time, implementing a theme that is true to the original design. Cost is a related concern. At some point, the discussion widened to include topics themers should better understand about the ramifications of certain design decisions.
Of course, there are lots of factors at play here. For me, one of the key factors is how the people work together as a team and what is their communication like. At this point, I have just jotted down some of the things we talked about. I would love to get time to go deeper and create useful templates and guidelines for streamlining the design to theme process.
Here's a list of some of the issues, factors and ideas we batted around, plus a few extra that came to mind while writing this up. These are just rough notes and ideas; coming mainly from a manager's and a developer's point of view. I apologize if anything comes off as too developer biased. My goal is to develop guidelines that help everyone involved in the design and implementation of Drupal sites.
** css: prefer classes to ids
*** knowing standard drupal id's and classes
** example - understanding best deliverables for a fivestar rating system
** evaluating hosting costs for drupal site designs, hosting vs. optimization
** module heavy sites. panels based sites
** module conflicts
*** caching and fonts
** the proper use of javascript within Drupal
*** how to convert typical js for use with Drupal
*** how to convert jQuery or AJAX for use with Drupal
*** showing and hiding form fields - best practices
Typical team structures (here are some typical ones).
Anyway. lots of loose ideas here. I'd love to go deeper. I hope someone writes a book on this someday. I'd love to read it. Better yet, I'd love get people like jensimmons to help write it. :)
Anyone out there have any related resources, war stories or additional points?
Planning next Clinic for Wednesday, July 14th, probably at Rob's place, also in Ojai.