DrupalCon

The masses have spoken! Four of the Four Kitchens’ web chefs will be presenting (you guessed it) four sessions at DrupalCon San Francisco 2010! Here’s the low down in case you want to catch any of these talks during the conference.

Day one

On Monday at 5:30pm, Todd and Aaron will present From Photoshop to Drupal Theme. The takeaway from this talk will be stressing the importance of “designing for a system” rather than just focusing on how individual pages look in Drupal.

Day two

On Tuesday we’ll have two sessions. Don’t sleep in after the first night of partying, because at 9:45am you’ll watch to catch Todd’s Accelerated grid theming using NineSixty, an in-depth discussion about grid-based design in Drupal.

Then at 4:15pm, David will be talking about Performance testing The Economist Online using The Grinder, which is an open source Java-based load testing framework.

Day three

And on Wednesday at 3pm, Diana will be presenting PHP for NonProgrammers, a great introduction for those web designers who have only ever touched HTML and CSS.

We are still 62 days away from DrupalCon San Francisco 2010, but in order to get truly excited about the event, you’ll want to start thinking about the amazing sessions you’ll attend. Beginning today, attendees are allowed to vote on those sessions they most want to see on the final schedule in April.

This year, Four Kitchens is both sponsoring DrupalCon San Francisco and offering to share our experience and knowledge with the community. If you’d like to see any of the sessions listed below, please vote! (And tell your co-workers, friends, and pets* to vote, too.)

Jake Strawn of Drupal Dynamics and I are teaming up to propose a Accelerated grid theming using NineSixty session for DrupalCon Paris. (To be fair, he beat me to it and was gracious enough to add me as a co-presenter.)

Our session will cover the following basics of the 960 grid system:

• What is 960.gs?
• Using the NineSixty theme as your starting point / parent theme
• Understanding the grid-x, push-x, pull-x classes
• Why a grid-based system can help speed up theme development
• How to break the 960-pixel limit

In the last month, I have presented sessions on 960.gs and the NineSixty theme at DrupalCamps in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Stockholm. Most recently, I co-presented a session at Drupal Design Camp Boston with Nathan Smith, creator of the 960 grid system. You can download the slide decks on our “Presentations” page.

UPDATE 2009-06-08: You can download these slide decks (and more!) from our Presentations page.
—The Web Chefs

DrupalCamp Stockholm 2009

• Is Drupal secure: the Drupal project’s responses to the web’s most common software vulnerabilities
• Scalable Drupal infrastructure: a guide to planning, deploying, and scaling big websites

Drupalcon DC 2009

• Building infrastructure you can scale, monitor, and maintain
• The next 10 Years: the future of application scalability and responsiveness

“CVS Instructions” tab on the Author Taxonomy module

Drupal’s CVS is now more user-friendly!

As part of the Documentation Sprint at Drupalcon DC 2009, web chef David Strauss built a “CVS Instructions” tab for Drupal.org. The tab provides concise, step-by-step instructions on how to check out, commit, patch, tag, and branch any module or theme. A simple drop-down box at the top of the page allows the user to select the version of the module or theme they want to work with, and the instructions are updated to display exact, copy-and-pastable commands.

Here’s a taste of what you’ll be getting at DrupalCon DC.

DrupalCon DC swag

The stickers and button were designed by Four Kitchens. Development Seed very graciously printed and paid for the buttons. Thanks, Development Seed!

Just for kicks, here are some DrupalCon “campaign buttons” we cooked up while brainstorming T-shirt ideas. We’re releasing them under the GPLv3, so feel free to use `em as you see fit!

We’ve been busy preparing submissions for the DrupalCon DC T-shirt contest. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far.

See more snazzy designs »

Photo by Don LaVange

Besides sponsoring next year’s DrupalCon Four Kitchens is also offering to share our know-how in the form of five session proposals and a MEGA session series on theming! Oh yes, we have a plethora. Read the rundowns below and if you find one you want to see on the schedule — go vote for it!

Four Kitchens is proud to announce that we are attending and helping sponsor DrupalCon DC. From March 4th through March 7th, the chefs will be in Washington, D.C. to discuss their recipes for scalability, theme development, module development, design, usability, project management, and business strategy. And we promise we don’t use any secret sauce!

If there is a particular topic you would like to see the chefs present a session on, please add a comment to this entry, contact us, or send us a tweet on Twitter.

Photo by Ryan McFarland