Originally published on http://palantir.net/blog/designers-and-themers-took-drupalcon-dc-storm
I've finally got enough sleep to be able to coherently organize my thoughts after an amazing week at Drupalcon DC. It actually took me 36 hours to get from DC to my new home in Taipei. But now that I'm sleeping more than 3-4 hours a night, I wanted to talk about the mind-bending experiences the Palantir Themers had last week.
As we prepared for Drupalcon DC, I started to notice a problem with the schedule for people interested in Design, Theming, and Usability: there simply weren't enough time slots for all the really great sessions that were proposed.
So I organized a Design+Usability BOF track that ran all day in one of the BOF rooms. 7 persenters gladly continued the D+U conversation after the scheduled ones had ended. And, with only a white board and some tweets to get the word out, we had 30-50 people attending all day on Friday. Sweet! And when one presenter failed to show up, 4 people jumped up and gave little mini-presentations showing off neat theming tricks they knew. How awesome is that? And, in between sessions, themers and designers were meeting and sharing ideas.
Colleen Carroll (caroltron) and I gave our "Sustainable Theming" presentation during the BOF track. We started the talk by showing how we had screwed up one site and how that led to our theme-the-general-case-then-the-specific methodology. (Read more about it.) Colleen definitely earned herself some fans at that session. :-)
I'm going to quickly skip over the insane after-hours drinking-then-coding that happened that week and just mention that after Saturday's code sprint, I attended the infamous ice cream hackathon (more details and photos will undoubtably surface after the participants recover from #drupalflu.) And after webchick mentioned this issue to me that night, I'm now the maintainer of 3 soon-to-be-ex-core themes. Basically, I "took one for the team."
Actually, getting the old themes out of core was part of the plan I presented during my New core themes for Drupal 7 session. The primary analogy I made during my talk was that PHP/CSS coders are on one side of a Jr. High Gymnasium and Designers are on the other. And we need to make Drupal dance! For those of you who have a serious interest in this, please watch the video and take a look at the outline of how we can achieve this goal and get beautiful themes into Drupal 7!
But the presentations were only a small part of what made Drupalcon DC so memorable for me. (Although minute 35 of Morten's presentation will forever be burned in my brain.) What amazed me was the way in which all of the Designers and Themers came together at this Drupalcon in an unprecedented way. I wasn't the only one who had self-organized at DCDC. Besides the Design+Usability BOF track, there was a Design Outreach BOF on Thursday night, a Themer's Dinner and an all-day-Saturday Designer BOF.
The Themer's dinner at La Tasca was phenomenal! Pitchers of Sangria (Thanks, purrin!) and wall-to-wall designers and themers. Not only did we get to put faces with names we've seen in IRC, we met a ton of new people who've never been in IRC and who were equally excited about Designing with Drupal.
And out of the Saturday BOF session, the Design for Drupal group was born, a committed group of Designers, Themers and like-minded Developers. We have started weekly Design IRC meetings to discuss plans for D7, Design Outreach and general Design/Theming improvements. Please join us!
Drupal Designers and Themers have definitely achieved critical mass!
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