Aaron Stanush

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.)

In early August, David, Todd, and I took a road trip to Dallas, TX to attend the first ever DrupalCamp Dallas. It was a two-day event organized by several Dallas-based Drupal shops: LevelTen Interactive, Koine Media, and Tarakan Design. We had a lot of fun meeting fellow Texas Drupalers and saw some excellent presentations as well.

We’re co-hosting a party and you’re invited!

Photo by Antonio Zugaldia on Flickr (CC-Attribution)

On Wednesday, May 20th at 6:30pm, Four Kitchens is teaming up with GeekAustin to spread Drupal love in Austin. This free event is a chance for local Drupal professionals to share their passion with the curious and uninitiated masses of our fair city.

After many months of deliberation, we’ve decided to totally rebrand Four Kitchens. It was a tough decision — there’s so much work that needs to be done — but we decided, in the end, that our firm needed a new look.

Our goals for the rebranding are:

• Identify Four Kitchens as a leading Drupal consulting firm.
• Raise awareness of our design skills and portfolio. (We’re not just scalability experts!)
• Create an iconic brand that associates the Four Kitchens with quality, respect, and community involvement.

Please check out our ideas below. Any feedback is welcome. We really need your help!

Four Kitchens logo: version 1

Inspiration: Building a website is like reading a book. First, you ride your fixed-gear bike to a locally owned, vegan bookstore and pick out something about World Trade Organization-sponsored coups. Then you turn the book over to see how much it costs. Finally, you pedal home — uphill — and buy it on Amazon in a hot minute.

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!

If you’ve keep up with Drupal news, you know there’s a hefty ongoing process of redesigning Drupal.org. Leisa Reichelt has played a huge part in documenting this process and has started some great discussions as well as set up some super useful cardsorting exercises to crowdsource site architecture concerns.

These icons were originally created to correspond with session tracks for the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 conference. They didn’t end up being used, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to forget about them. Now you can download and use these hot icons for your own Drupal-related events, projects, and websites. These icons are released under the GPLv3 so they are yours to use, modify, and rerelease.

Download the Drupal topic icons pack (1.5MB)

After all flying into Europe on different days, we finally converged in Munich. From there we hopped trains to Vienna, Budapest, and finally Szeged. It’s a beautiful city and its modest size is a welcome change.

There’s more coverage to come, but for now check out David’s sessions that he’s presenting or co-presenting:

Just in time for Drupalcon Szeged 2008, Four Kitchens has a few shirts and lots of stickers with our new logo to give away to our fellow Drupalers meeting up in Szeged. We’ll also be giving away some sweet Drupal stickers to put on your laptop, bike, dog, chair, or grandma. To get your hands on one, simply find us—before we find you. photo by Todd Ross Nienkerk