Drupal Design Camp Boston
Events Sunday, June 14th, 2009
Drupal Design Camp Boston was a 2-day event held between June 13-14, 2009 at the Stata Center on MIT’s campus. This was the first event focusing exclusively on how to design/create themes for Drupal. Drupal conferences/events in the past were primarily geared for ‘techies’ vs. those who have more of a creative/design background. Admission, lunch and coffee were free courtesy of the event sponsors.
Overall, I felt this was a great event. The speakers were primarily from the ‘techie’ side of the Drupal spectrum so it was a bit difficult to follow theming/design advice being more of a web marketing and design type and not presently having a solid understanding of Drupal’s terminology, but they provided an excellent overview/foundation for me and others like myself to grow upon.
I learned designing for Drupal can become easier by utilizing grid design tools and other utilities such as Blueprint CSS, NineSixty, Skinr, Studio, Yahoo CSS etc. Using a grid system/CSS framework can significantly reduce development time, address browser compatibility issues via built-in functions/code and allow you to be on the ‘same page’ as other developers in creating web sites and thus set yourself up to get more support by utilizing well-known development tools.
At the end of the second day I sat in on Maureen Lyons’ presentation entitled “Theming from a CSS Framework” which was very valuable as it was presented using a ‘from a designer to a designer’ approach. One can generate Blueprint CSS code via an online generator to help simplify the designing by grid process.
Drupal is an excellent CMS and development framework that offers excellent scalability if a site you build should ever require more features in the future. You may want a brochure web site initially but may want additional elements such as blogs, photo albums, e-commerce functionality, etc. and Drupal has a module (or core functionality already built-in) for virtually anything you can think of. However, with that said, if your project requires a simple solution, you may want to reconsider utilizing Drupal as you may not need such a robust solution and you may very well find Drupal difficult to theme if you are a ‘noob’. Various other open source programs exist for specialized functionality such as Elgg for social networking web sites, WordPress for blogs, Gallery for photo galleries, etc.
More information on the event is available here:
- “Design 4 Drupal: a movement takes off” (via Drupal.org)
- “Drupal Design Camp Boston on June 13-14, 2009″ (via Drupal.org)
- Design 4 Drupal Boston (event web site)
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