Summary of Drupal Design Camp Berlin

So this blog post will be a summary of my impressions from the Drupal Design Camp that just took place in Berlin. It is the result of a gentile request by fellow drupalist Mattias Axelsson (@mattiasaxelsson)  from the very cool Stockholm based agency Happiness. Turning it into a blog post will enable anyone else that takes an interest to read this as well.

Day 1

The camp was planned for the 25-26 of June, which is pretty bad if you are from Sweden, where we have the humongous Midsummer Holiday on the 24th of june. It is almost as big a holiday as christmas only it involves even more drinking than Christmas does. If you have family it is pretty hard to skip this holiday and this meant I couldn’t make it to Berlin until late afternoon of the first day of the camp.

Once there I found the classic mix of drupal people floating about the premises. The location was the German Language School in Kastanienallee close to Eberswalderstraße U-Bahnhof which was a very good location both as the school was crisp and with adequate facilities and the neighbourhood was a presumably hip youthful area with about a gazillion places to eat at low or medium cost. Unfortunately the WiFi of the camp wasn’t good at all, and not many people managed to get online during the two days of the camp.

The registration procedure was a charming do-ocracy initative. A hand written note in blue ink with three easy steps to follow.
Write your name on the participants list
Make your own name tag (be creative!)
Grab a programme

Next to the instructions where some white stickers and a red pen to get creative with. The schedule was one hour behind I was told, but somehow I still started my session at the announced time, though on a different topic than what the programme said. The programme had me doing ”960 - working with grids” and my slides where about Visual Hierarchy. I apologise to the two young men who really wanted to hear about 960. My intention was to catch you in the hallway and do a quick improvised ”960” BOF with you guys. But I never seemed to catch you later.

I caught a quick glimpse of Erik Stielstra’s presentation ”The scary render array” which seemed to be a very thorough in-depth look at the new rendering methodology/syntax in Drupal 7 and from what I gathered it was greatly appreciated.
Andreas Sahle alias Pixelmord  gave a talk on Sherlock markup & Sammy Semantic with some nice pointers on how to manipulate the output of Drupal.

Day 2

I’m sorry to say I missed the aftercamp of day 1, but from what I could gather it was very much appreciated by my more party prone Drupal peers. No camp is complete unless it involves huge quantities of beer of course. And the co-organiser Mortendk set a good example for everyone I believe. Jesper Woeldiche, a fellow dane of his, got us some exclusive footage of Morten soundly asleep sparsely dressed, during  his session of the next day. The aforementioned session which was about {less}. A method of doing CSS-coding that I’ve been very curious about for some time, but have not, until now, gotten around to learn. Basically, as Jesper explained, it is a short-hand and smarter syntax which allows you to write stylesheets with variables and nesting. Done rightly it saves a lot of time and also a fair bit of aggrevation. The entire concept of {less} and also a crash course in how to work with it was presented by Jesper in a commendable way and as always, I’ve come to learn, with clean nicely typographed slides. Spiced up, as I mentioned, with some revealing pictures of MortenDK.

Roy Sholten, who is one of the D7 UX maintainers, held a rewarding session entitled ”Drupal 8 UX – connecting the dots”, focusing on the logics and experience for the day-to-day-operations-user of the sites we produce. I. e the client we hand over the site to. There is much room for improvement in simplifying the logic of what and how things are named in Drupal. How should, for instance an ordinary site manager know the difference between a node and a block. ”Design for the mental model” was his motto. In user testing, he made evident, it is obvious that the user doesn’t care about blocks or nodes or whatever. He introduced the term a ”component” of a page, which I liked. Also there can be difficulties for a user to know what happens when he presses ”save” while creating content. Does that mean it is saved and published? Saved as a draft? As always it was interesting listening to the wisdom of Roy. I was sorry to completely have missed the UX workshops of the first day.

Hagen Graf was next talking about ”Configure more – code less” with some great examples of how you save time and headache by configuring rather than coding. If, for example,  the client is participating in the configuration and creation of the site, code that has overridden how Drupal works and the preferences you are able to set, creates big problems. By sticking to the configuration model, you don’t only save time, but a project is also easier to maintain, especially when more than one party is involved. Hagen also showed some nifty tricks in how almost anything can be achieved with the holy trinity of Rules, Flags and Views, giving credit to Johan Falk (itangalo) of NodeOne for his eminent screencasts on this and other ”configuration” topics.

All in all the camp was a success from the point of view that a lot of inspiration was given and the Design community got some good work done in the workshops and informal discussion. A total of 151 souls had met up for the camp which is more than the Drupalcon had five years ago. During the closing session MortenDK announced that in future the camp will be named Drupal Frontend to make our position clearer towards the developers. From the point of view of Drupal as a framework, frontend is the piece in the jigsaw that we are involved with. At the closing session a representative of the London Drupalcon was also given the opportunity to make his case for London. These UK-guys are always extremely witty and elegant in their presentations of Drupalcon London. Beaming with confidence. And rightly so. London is indeed a pretty cool location. I took a sticker with the RAF/Mods roundel in exchange for mentioning them.  I guess I'm not alone in being the only one looking forward to the next Drupal Frontend Camp, and curious as to where it will be held. Someone mentioned Amsterdam. Sounds good.