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Jun 06 2011
Jun 06

We did it. Drupal shops and other website companies are sometimes very fast in creating a new site for a client. But not so with their own website. It took us about half a year from initial idea to launch - guess this was pretty good.

We wanted a new design and we wanted a better structure, and of course we wanted to present ourselves better to potential customers and everyone else that visits our site at undpaul.de. Apart from some blog posts, the site is all German at the moment, but we are working on it.

The spark of conception

We thought about what makes undpaul special, and quickly realized: it is the people. All members of our company are very active in the community - and of course nice people you would like to make the acquaintance of :). So how about putting the people out in the open? The idea was to create a slideshow of big photos of us on the top of the front page. Darn, we did not have the photos. So hire a photographer and off we went to the studio. We were lucky to know someone who was good at people shots. The surprising thing was - we were done in under two hours and had a lot of great shots.

It was a lot of fun rotating onto the photo stage in several rounds and being shot in all our - ehm - glory. I can recommend the trip to the photographer to everyone, you might find out you can look better than you thought. Now we are able to present a shot of every team member along with a statement about their personal area of work or thoughts about Drupal to directly address the viewer.

Presenting your work showcases right

What is the most interesting part of a webdesign shop for the client? Probably the sites the webshop has built to prove its competence. We wanted to highlight the best and create an easy navigation through the rest. So we tagged every sample in different categories and created multiple Views and slideshows to easily navigate through the showcases. This is a work in progress and feedback on how it works are very welcome. Jcarousel and Views Slideshow are great Views plugins for slideshows, especially Views Slideshow has great options that make almost everything possible.

Upgrading to Drupal 7

Our old site was running on Drupal 6 and this was a great chance to collect some experience in upgrading a site with a lot of CCK fields, comments, images and stuff. The upgrade went smoothly in general, but we had to touch a lot of things manually: Formatters get lost, so you have to rework views, image styles still get lost so you have to recreate them, text areas lose their input formats (might be fixed by now). Loads of stuff, some of which we still did not file issues of (shame on us). But in the end - having all our content transferred to Drupal 7 was worth the ride. Working in Drupal 7 - ah, like a breath of fresh air.

Fun with CSS3

This is the modern web. We do not have to limit ourselves to Helvetica, Times and Verdana. So we wanted a cool header font. Having found out that @font-face works perfectly well, I looked out for a nice font. After some experimenting and finding out that a cool font is not automatically one that looks good on the web we settled on Yanone Kaffesatz. But as this is a bit over-used on the web, we chose the light variant, which you do not see as often. Comminication about how that looks revealed something interesting (no secret really): Anti-aliasing makes thin fonts look a lot bolder on Mac that it does on PC. So find a size that looks good on both...

Box-Shadow is easy in modern browsers. Not so in IE - including IE8. In the end (and since our dropshadow Jquery plugin strangely did not work anymore) we settled on using IE's native shadow filter . The filter works perfectly well after some getting used to it. Alas, it has one drawback... It creates extra padding for all the shadows you add to elements. So conditional stylesheets for IE and all elements that have shadows on them. I doubt I will do that again :(. Rather search longer for a better script...

Putting it all together

The feedback we get to the site is quite encouraging. The personal touch we wanted to add appears to get across to the visitor. Having used some modern techniques may have been a learning experience partly, but hopefully has added a spark here and there. The site is very much a work in progress and more areas need work and the entire thing needs more content.
All in all it was and is a very rewarding experience to work on a site and being able to closely follow your own vision and ideas. A bit like decorating a great new flat and being able to use the best materials and furniture. What could be nicer?

Dec 23 2010
Dec 23

Drupal 7 has cost enormous blood, sweat and tears. Now's the time for celebrating. And hey, there are the release parties. To combine this with marketing, there is something else we could do. The style of this video struck me.

So we will create something in the likes (only better, of course). This is a kickoff post to make you do the small videos that we cut into a big one at the end. Graciously, 300+ has offered to do the video editing and they are good at that.

The video will contain: Statements from you on why Drupal 7 is so great, and a big countdown that leads into people welcoming Drupal 7 like the new year on New Year's Eve.

Release Parties: the perfect occasion

We guess the release parties are the most appropriate space to whip out your mobile video recording device of any kind, and show us what you got. Working title: "Seven is seconds away".
If you record some videos before the parties and upload them to YouTube, it is much appreciated. So we can market the effort more..

Here is a video that explains what we need from you all to make this rock:

Steps to stardom

As explained in the video, I repeat the steps here once more. Do the video on your own, or do it with your pals. The more pieces we have, the greater the end result will be.

1. Make a statement

about what you think about Drupal 7. What excites you most? What does it mean to you personally?

Examples:

"It's so easy now, my granny will build a site with it tomorrow."
"Two words are enough: cutting edge."
"Thanks to everyone who put so much work into it"

2. Count backwards

somewhere between 60 and 0

About 20 numbers are enough. To synchronize, best use a metronome, so you can look at the camera while counting. Set the metronome to 60 beats per minute. Here is a free one for Android: www.appbrain.com/app/mobile-metronome/gabriel.metronome

3. Give a release cheer

Let us feel your positive energy while shouting "Releeeease". Supporting gestures much appreciated.

4. Go wild with cheering

Groups have an advantage here. If in doubt, consult the air guitar wold championships for inspiration in planned madness. If you are good, they can hear you in Helsinki.

5. Upload your video and notify us

Upload the video to your webserver or any video platform (YouTube preferred) and post a link to it as a comment to this post.

For best video quality it is preferred you upload your finished video onto some webserver and send us a download link (as a comment to this post or per mail to the undpaul contact email). So we have an uncompressed source file for editing.

If you find it easier, you can also upload the videos to YouTube. We are not sure if all these little videos on YouTube make sense, so decide yourself: If your video is a fun piece in itself, upload it anyway. There is no limit in including more improvised madness than the four points we need...

Since YouTube does not have groups anymore, we need to collect the videos differently: tag them "drupal-7-release". Also best start the title with "Drupal 7 Release" so we and other people can find them. Maybe "Drupal 7 Release Sam Boyer shows what he thinks of it..." To have a playlist in the end that shows all the pieces and the finished big one might be interesting :)

With your help, we can create a very lively video that can be a great marketing resource for Drupal 7 and some time after.

Nov 29 2010
Nov 29

Design Camp Prague was great. I met quite some people I did not know. A strange feeling to be in a Drupal crowd that was not dominated by developers... Well, actually it was not dominated by designers either. The Drupal design community consists of up to 98% of themers, or designers that know a lot about coding.

On Sunday very early in the morning (regarding the fact that the camp crowd hit the Prague nightlife really hard the night before) we had a brainstorming session about how to get more designers into the Drupal community.

Who is a designer?

Well, even trying to define what a designer is needs a consensus. Being the host of this memorable session, I tried to gear it more in the direction of artistic designers that know little or nothing about coding, the most they would know is HTML and CSS, but no PHP (run and hide). It is this group of people that are really good at aesthetics but that hate coding that Drupal sorely lacks. Concerning people that are active in the issue queue, we had a consensus in another session that you cannot count more than four in all of Drupal. (which may be wrong, but it sure feels like this).

Possible motivations for designers to get involved

The interesting thing is that a visually oriented designer (what a bad term, but I hope you understand ;) ) could gain quite a lot by participating in Drupal. Here are some ways they could:

Participate directly in Drupal:

  • Work on the redesign of drupal.org
  • Create a new theme for Drupal 8
  • Create a free theme to be hosted on drupal.org
  • Sell commercial themes from their own site ore one of the big template shops
  • Help out in UX Design of Core or contrib

What could they win?

  • Create a contrib theme that is installed on hundreds of sites, and stands out visually from other Drupal themes. Try this in WordPress - very hard, since there are so many good themes around. Much easier to do in
  • Create a contrib theme that gets installed on thousands of sites (think Acquia Marina). In contrib land it is tolerated that you put a backlink to your site in the footer.
  • Become famous
  • Become famous and be hired by a Drupal shop to do the design for the next whitehouse.gov
  • Add a new skillset to your portfolio: knowing Drupal. Not every designer hates being a themer. Learn to theme and add even another skill set to your portfolio.
  • Get rich. Drupal projects can get quite huge, and designers and themers often earn good money as all other Drupal-workers. This is a lot different in WordPress-Land.

Big Plans in Prague

We had quite some ideas how to improve the situation and how to make it easier for artistic designers to get involved in Drupal.

Designer Starter Kit: creating themes made easier

Creating Themes for Drupal is hard for a Designer coming new to Drupal. When we tried to figure out why, the main reason to us wasn't even a technical one.
As the biggest obstacle we saw that you cannot even define what Drupal is. Opposed to WordPress, which will almost always be seen as a blog system. Create a theme for WordPress - create a blog theme. You come to this idea quickly and already have a picture of the use case in your mind.

Not so with Drupal. It can be a brochureware, shopping cart, wiki, blog, social networking site, forum, news portal... where to start?
So we decided to create an install profile to cater exactly that need. While we have not fully decided which direction it will take - Blog, Brochure or just displaying core content types like http://demo.kiwi-themes.com/drupal-dev/, the general plan is layed out.

We created the Designer Starter Kit that will ultimately lead to an install profile that gives Designers an immediate starting point for their Drupal theme. Having some sample content and looking like a small site, it gives a use case. It will contain an empty theme with all files necessary to start. There will also be a Readme file and a tutorial video (or even several) how to start. If we can keep designers away from template files and start by modifying CSS only this should help a lot. It turns out the idea is not new...

Also thought to be included is a Photoshop file that contains all elements that need to be designed for Drupal: comments, author information, login block, book navigation... The plan has to prove itself as the project goes on and sure we need to find out if it is really helpful.

If you have a basic install profile for Drupal 7 with some sample content that could be useful for DSK: upload it to the issue queue of DSK, we are collecting these to compare and build one or more that are really helpful.

Creating and improving drupal.org/design

The first and most probable place to go when you want to know anything about Drupal is drupal.org. Now if you are a designer, you may look for a place that gets you started, but you won't find it. You will wind lots of theming tutorials, very technical and telling you all about page variables and preprocess functions. But if you are a designer in the aforementioned sense and are visually and artistically inspired, you will quickly come to the conclusion: "Drupal is not for me".

This has been discussed many times, and Mogdesign started an initiative in Copenhagen by announcing www.drupaldesigners.org/ in order to create a place where artistic Drupal designers could meet and exchange ideas.

Discussing this with Mogdesign, it was clear that creating a resource off of drupal.org is not the optimal way. Though d.o. puts constraints on what you can do there and consensus needs to be found with webmasters and all other people involved, the central place is more powerful and makes a lot more sense.

So what do we need to do on drupal.org/design? It could be a lot, and there is already an issue for this: www.drupal.org/node/898110 It needs to be fleshed out what is needed to welcome designers on d.o. A few ideas here:

  • Gallery of beautifully designed Drupal sites
  • Links to resources to get a quick start into designing for Drupal
  • Gallery of beautiful Drupal themes
  • Links to design-related forums, channels, and g.d.o groups
  • The page needs to be beautifully designed to appeal to visually oriented people

Create a space to contribute by uploading layouts and more

Another idea we had: the easiest way a designer can contribute is by showing a design. Just like Jeff Burnz once started: how to create a place where designers can contribute their layouts and themers offer to make Drupal themes out of them? Taking into consideration the benefits for the designers in "What could they win" above, there might be incentives to contribute a design.

What else needs to be improved to make it easier for aesthetically oriented people to get involved

  • Make it easier to upload images on d.o., especially on the issue queue. Uploading an image to the issue queue is next to impossible for someone new to d.o.
  • Offer help with CVS and Git to enable Designers to create a contrib theme on d.o.
  • lots more, you name it...

Spotlight on you

All these ideas need people to step up and make them real. A place to discuss is the Design Group on g.d.o. To really get something done, the issue queue is a better place for sure. The channel on IRC would be #drupal-design.

If you want to contribute you can also just leave a comment on this blogpost, we'll try to guide you to the right place and give help on how to get started.

Oct 14 2010
Oct 14

This weekend, undpaul is proud to present the Drupal 7 Sprint Camp in Hannover in collaboration with the German Drupal Initiative. Note the absence of "code" in the name ;) We are happy to cover non-code topics to the same extent that we will be doing coding, of course.

From its announcement, the sprint has quickly been a sell-out success. The 40 available places were quickly taken without even a real announcement. A testament to the vividness and commitment of the Drupal community ;)

We will be sprinting at the Coworking Space Hannover this coming weekend on Sat/Sun 16/17 Oct. with an opening socializing event on Friday night. On the sprint days, we will be working in four groups: coding, marketing, documentation and translation. Each group has its own team lead to coordinate better and to have someone to speak to for the team members at all time. People that wanna participate remotely, can jump in IRC channel #d7sc this weekend. This channel will be german speaking but if we have a lot of english speaking participants, we will open another channel or use #drupal-contribute.

The topics

The concentration will be on modules rather than on core, and on meta topics. Personally I am responsible for the marketing section, which needs a lot of attention especially over here in Germany. In Germany, Drupal is not the leading high-end OSS CMS at all. In fact, it is doing so badly, that a big publishing house could not be convinced to publish a learning DVD about Drupal because market research tells them it won't get sufficient sales. Well, it is not that bad, but the fact is we gotta do something over here.

One special focus of the coding group will be Views 3 for Drupal 7: Views is quasi-core, and in order to being able to use Drupal 7 for real-life projects, it needs a lot of attention. As Daniel Wehner (dereine), co-maintainer of Views, says that the problem with Views 3 for Drupal 7 is that too few people (surprisingly) use it yet. There is actually a lack of issues, something unheard of in the views issue queue. So we will also focus to test it in a real-life environment to find the bugs - or verify the absence of them. Another quasi-core area of Drupal 7 that has gotten too little attention is the upgrade path for CCK. There are voices that say it should be core issues, but to get Drupal 7 out the door, we simply cannot afford this. So hopefully we will be testing the CCK upgrade path and improve it as well.

We are looking forward to a great weekend. Expect to hear reports and see impact on the issue queue from us ;)

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web