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Designer vs. Developer

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I made it down to the european Drupal Developer Days in Brussels, and were lucky enough that they accepted my speak, even that Im not real a developer.
As i promised in Brussels I would make a post outta this this + a link to the slides, and add some more background. Thanx for not throwing rocks after me during the session

Scratch your own itch

My big itch with drupal since day one (drupal 4.7) have been that drupal adds markup and css by The truckloads, it never seemed like the developers really minded, about this little detail. "dude it works"

Dont Think its out of pure devloper evil but simply by having another focus, after all gettig the functions & site to work is a bit higher up the list than satisfieng a capucino drinking smartass designer-themer-whatever
The answer always been "dude you can overwrite it"

This have resolved in themers and designers using obsene amount of time looking through sourcecode ( thanx firebug) to figure out where a css class could be overwritten, not to mention the hours of trying to change the markup somewhere wrapped deep down inside of 43 divs. the sad reality have also been that by overwriting some css elements, or removing classes or markup could actually break modules (my mothership did that with views ajax pagination, actually I was a bit proud when that happend ;))

Drupal7 is heaven

Now in drupal 7 theres been taken giant leaps forward, thanx to both developers & themers and designers.

One of the thing im most excited about (besides the 6000 theme preprocess calls and hooks) is the way that modules should declare its css files, So the drupal dev days brussels seemed to be a perfect spot to indoctrinate the european drupal developers about this new namescheme.
If theres one thing i really learned during my now soon to be 5 years with drupal is that theres a huge difference in the way that we look at the website (and the world) and that the rest of the world really dont gets the diffence between frontend and backend "its just a website", so hopefully by adding that little story into my slides i also managed to break some barriers, and explain what it is that makes us speak diffent dialects of geek, and why we not always understand eachother.

If you dont really care about all that and just wants the 10 seconds talk, here it is:

  1. Dont add crap to the frontend
  2. name you css files by what they do (modulen.admin.css, module.base.css & module.theme.css)
  3. Dont add crap! - its the themes job to make it look & feel its the modules job to make it work.

Heres the slides on slideshare (I even made it to be the featuredslides of the day)
Hopefully this will be yet another step to change the way that we develop sites in drupal forever(!)
If you wanna dig deeper down then read these to post from Jacine Luisi

    The Brussels Dev Days

    oh and did drupal developer days brussels kick ass? bet ya!
    It was as always great to meat discuss & talk drupal with people in and around the community.

    I made swentel blush, with my love for display suite & got around to talk alot from drupalappstore to surviving as a freelancer + everything in the middle + html5 and hopefully made a ton of new

    I was very amused by the amount of geeks that didn't understood that danish developer Tinef wasn't someones girlfriend . just because she wear high heals apparently she didn't looked like a developer ;) Dudes accept it Drupal is so hot & big now, that we are attracting everything from high badass heels to people wearing long leather jackets and carry swords on their backs (or was that only the ones that studied old medieval german literature - oooh details forgotten in the liters of belgian beers)

    a huge thanx to the whole team behind the Drupal Dev days in Brussels!
    Im looking much forward to comming next time, where ever its' gonna be in europe, and preach about the wonders of design for developers ;)

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