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.
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.
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Should 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 ?
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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.
Read moreCall for prototypers
If you have development chops, designers and other contributors of this community need your help bringing designs to life.
Allow me to paint a picture of the need and skills required...
The task of creating content has been redesigned (http://groups.drupal.org/node/217434), and has reached a point of consensus. At this point, the design really needs to interactive to flush out how all of the various interactions will work (or don't). Additionally, once made interactive, we validate the direction by testing the prototype with end users.
Read moreUX: How do other systems do it?
I wanted to share some of the inspiration that me and yoroy have been sitting on around the page & layout user experience. I think its always important to look at others, to draw inspiration from and get a feeling what works and doesn't work.
Because it's hard to really browse through a photo collection in a g.d.o post, I have uploaded them to Flickr. To make sure this collection grows, I will add all photos that are uploaded in this discussion to the set.
Flickr set : Layout & Blocks : Other systems
Read morePlugins System for Core
We've been quiet about it and it is no longer technically under the umbrella of any of the initiatives but I've posted a patch containing most of the work done on plugins to the core issue queue to start discussing the steps to getting it committed. Follow it here: http://drupal.org/node/1497366
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The new theme system
Note: this is deprecated in favor of http://drupal.org/node/1499460
Read moreSprint: Rebuild theme layer for Drupal 8
A sprint to tear down and rebuild the theme system for D8 based on ideas based the ideas outlined below. We'll be gathering a few key people in San Francisco at the Chapter Three offices to formulate a plan and build a working example.
We invite everyone else who's interested in cleaning up Drupal's theme layer to please participate remotely, we'll be on IRC in the #drupal-themesprint channel from 10am Pacific onward each day, April 20th, 21st and 22nd.
1) John Albin's core conversation:
http://denver2012.drupal.org/content/re-thinking-rendertheme-layers
2) Jacine's blog:
Read moreMarch 20, 2012 Drupalcon BOF, Semantics: What is a 'page'?
In this BoF we tackled the job of clarifying for ourselves the meanings of 2 words that are commonly used in discussions around Core Context UX. The words were 'page' (what is a web page?) and 'context' (how many ways is this word used?).
To do this we split into 2 groups of 15 or so people and recorded our findings. Here are our notes for the 'page' discussion. The 'context' discussion is documented at http://groups.drupal.org/node/218904
(MK: Thanks go to Miro for volunteering to capture everyone's thoughts as we went around the table.)
Notes:
Read moreMarch 20, 2012 Drupalcon BOF "Context" User Stories
Last updated by user advocate on Wed, 2012-04-11 20:35
Context is a (over) loaded word.
During the BoF we came up with a number of user stories. The purpose of these stories was not to come up with how to do these things. The purpose was to come up with stories related to the many different ways the word "context" is used throughout Drupal so that the language can be disambiguated.
What meaning of "context" is expressed in each story?
Try to use a synonym or other word that captures the meaning of "context" in each story. Some words or phrases that came up were:
"Arguments or Parameters that are passed"
Context UX – use cases
(After two hour skype call with Larry discussing Pages and Components, we came up with these use cases to do UI sketches for)
- "Here's an admin form for configuring a view for this" *
For the DX in providing admin UI for all this, this means coding/configuring the response rules for a given path. Where response rules boils down to providing forms that let people do such things as:
- I want a request to node/nid/history (with request type HTML) to be a list of teasers of the revisions of that node (nid).
Core Context UX: Page & Component library
Drupal’s site building user experience currently consists of moving between a lot of different tools and interfaces. Within Drupal 8 we want to unify these experiences (blocks, menus, views, panels…) more.
The experience that we are focusing on, is that of creating the front-end of your website - where content, blocks, views, menus are placed on pages and how these can be configured.
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