Drupalcon

At Drupalcon Europe, I gave a presentation very dear to my heart. It's the most personal introspective presentation I've given on Web Accessibility.

I hope it can also be a call to action for all of us to do better.

The slides and video of the presentation are available in the presentations section of my website.

At Drupalcon North America, I gave a presentation talking about my experience with the hot new CSS utility class system, Tailwind. I definitely learned a lot while working with it, the good, the bad, the ugly.

TLDR; Tailwind is better than Bootstrap.

The slides and video of the presentation are available in the presentations section of my website.

At Drupalcon Global, I gave a presentation talking about a 3rd way to tackle rendering content from a CMS. The two standard ways are:

1. Rendering it all on the server with the CMS, where the data provided may not match the design requirements
2. Creating an API (JSON:API or GraphQL) on the backend that serves the data to a frontend written in JavaScript. But now you need to handle all the form handling yourself.

The third way is rendering on the server, but query for the exact data you need with GraphQL inside the server's frontend Twig files.

At Drupalcon Munich, one of the awesome things was seeing so many people show an interest in helping out with Drupal 8’s Mobile Initiative. On the Friday after Drupalcon’s session, at that Code Sprint, there were four tables full of people helping out with JavaScript issues, Drupal’s administrative screens, responsive images, and HTML5. And, as Dries’ recent blog post shows, now is the perfect time for you to help out with the Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative.

This Friday through Sunday, I’m going to San Francisco to attend a sprint to “rebuild the theme layer” in Drupal 8. This is the next exciting step in a journey I started nearly 3 years ago.

I’ll hope you’ll join me at the sprints as we combat Drupal 7 and the Arrays of Doom!

Scene 1. [Day break. Our themer is hunched over his keyboard writing awesome themes in Drupal 6, but he’s troubled.]

The Drupalcon Chicago 2011 track chairs met for the first time last week. Our first task is to come up with track descriptions. For the first time, Theming is going to be separate track from Design and UX. While this shows a nice focus on these interrelated but distinct topics, I'm still trying to come up with a good description that helps define the dividing line between design and theming for sessions proposals like “Designing with CSS3”.

Anyway, here’s my first draft for my track’s description:

Theming Track

As Drupal’s mighty hands build markup, styling and dynamic behaviours, the lowly Newbs have forever strived to comprehend this Magic. With gnashing of teeth, wailing and despair often being their pitiful state. But, lo! Behold the mighty Drupalcon Theming Track. Forthwith, We, the Gods of Drupal, beseech the worthy to attend this track and despair no more.
[insert thunder crack here]

Hmm… I may have to tone it down. A bit.

Please rate and vote for my “I’m coming to DrupalCon Paris video avalanche” response. A free Drupalcon Paris ticket means more beer money. Daddy needs beer! So give me some lovin’, Drupal community!

Did I mention I rap about Drupal in the video? So go watch the “John Albin Wilkins” one and vote for me! :-D (See the detailed voting instructions below.)

Also, I’m behind in the polls right now! Help!

Originally published on http://palantir.net/blog/designers-and-themers-took-drupalcon-dc-storm