Drupalcamp Colorado 2009 has come and gone. The event garnered over 200 participants - at least half of which came from out of State. Over 40 sessions (if you include BOFs and the opening and closing sessions) occurred over the two days ranging from pure business to the highly technical. Ubercart was heavily presented with Ubercamp partnering with Drupalcamp. The camp was followed by a media sprint.

pingVision presented in quite a few sessions:

• Functional Interactive Design - Laura Scott
• Preprocess functions - the what, why and how - Matt Tucker
• How to Create a Module - John Fiala
• Drupal Security For Coders and Themers - Ben Jeavons
• Web Services With Drupal, or The Acronym Parade: A Dance With APIs - Ben Jeavons
• Studio - a bit more than a base theme - Matt Tucker and Al Steffen
• Project Management -- Agile is not "Cowboy" spelled backwards - Katherine Lawrence

I personally took photos and video in and out of sessions and drafted notes at the panels I attended. Poring over them this last week for posting online had me thinking how extraordinarily good the sessions were this year. The Flickr feed is filling up with photos from several of the participants as well. If you have photos from the event on Flickr, please tag them drupalcolorado!

The event has re-energized me, encouraging me to reengage my community projects head on. It has me getting excited for Drupalcon Paris and the opportunity to interface with a larger segment of our community. Finally it makes me think about where this event will be next year. Perhaps it will have 400 participants with worldwide attendance?

Thank you to the organizers and thanks to everyone that came. It was a great event that pingVision was delighted to sponsor.

DrupalCamp Colorado 2009 is happening this weekend in Denver. (Registration is still open!)

And we at pingVision have been preparing several presentations.

For programmers and developers wanting to get into Drupal development but are unfamiliar where to start, Lead Developer John Fiala is presenting the basics of Drupal Module Development:

Views, Panels, CCK, token, and the rest are great for getting most of any project done, but sometimes you need a little custom work to get the last 4% of your needs covered. When that happens, it's time to break out a code editor and write your own module.

[This session covers] how to set up a blank module, the usual basic hooks that you will implement, what to watch out for for security, and ideas on how to nudge and override Drupal to do what you need without having to kill a kitten, aka hack core.

If the Drupal API is new to you, this will be a session not to miss!

That's not all we're covering regarding the Drupal API. Senior Developer Ben Jeavons will be presenting on Drupal Web Services:

In this session I'll talk about how you can use Drupal as a web service for providing and communicating data for third-party consumption. I'll talk about some of the available solutions such as XML-RPC and RESTful applications. This won't be an overview of the properties of web services but rather a discussion and demo on implementing web service endpoints and clients with Drupal.

Ben will also be on a panel on Drupal Security.

For themers and front-end developers, Lead Themer Al Steffen and Senior Developer and Themer Matt Tucker are presenting on the Studio theme, which generated much attention last week at Design4Drupal:

Studio base theme gives a whole new array (pun intended) of capabilities for themers. By re-structuring some of the key aspects of the theme system such as preprocess functions, and keeping attributes as arrays until output, Studio provides a sustainable theme, making it easier to make incremental changes without the need to create additional template files.

People wanting a deeper understanding of the Drupal theming layer will want to see Matt Tucker's other session, Preprocess functions: what, why and how:

Template files are meant to be simple, with simple php conditional logic, and minimal code. As a general rule of thumb, logic should be placed within preprocess functions and the output assigned to variables which are then printed within the template file....

...Preprocess functions simplify a theme drastically by greatly reducing the number of needed template files.

This session will be highly focussed on samples, providing 'real-world' examples of how preprocess functions can be utilized to save time and energy while theming.

On the project management side, COO and Co-Founder Katherine Lawrence will be presenting Project Management: 'Agile' is not 'cowboy' spelled backwards. In it, she'll be sharing some of the things we learned as a company over the past four years handling dozens and dozens of projects.

In Project Management, what elements are critical? How is success measured? What are the benefits of well-executed Project Management to the developer and client?

How can a firm increase productivity without long hours and cost over-runs? Over the last four years we tried a range of approaches in this ever-evolving area.

These principles apply across the board, from the one-person shop to the larger firm.

I will be doing a presentation on Functional Interactive Design, and why good design is more than simply aesthetics:

Ever walk up to a door and pull on the handle, only to discover the door is push-only? Do you really know how to operate your clock-radio? Doors may be pretty, clocks may look cool, but when we have to actually use them, the measure of their design changes.

Same with websites. A website may be pretty at first blush, but can you find what you're looking for? Can you do what you want to do? Can you even figure out what you're supposed to do?

This presentation is on functional design concepts and how they apply to websites and web apps.

I will also be leading the closing plenary, where I hope not to do the talking at all — rather facilitating a general discussion where we'll all talk about what happened, what was great, what's happening next, etc.

And that's not even close to all that's happening at DrupalCamp Colorado this weekend!

We have three concurrent tracks of sessions presented by Drupal experts and enthusiasts in multiple topic areas!

We have Übercamp 2009!

We have a sponsored Saturday night party overlooking downtown Denver!

We also have stickers and t-shirts!

And lots and lots of Drupal!

So far, as I write this, 172 people have registered to get their Drupal on at DrupalCamp Colorado 2009. Join us!

Related:  Excitement, ideas and new designers' focus coming out of Design4Drupal Camp Introducing the Studio Theme Pack Supporting Drupal with a Platinum Sponsorship of DrupalCamp Colorado 2009

Last weekend, MIT was host to a somewhat unusual Drupal event:

Design4Drupal, where some 160 designers and interested developers gathered to talk about designing and theming for Drupal.

The Frank Gehry-designed Ray and Maria Stata Center was somehow appropriate to house a camp focused on Drupal design and theming, which often can feel like an adventure through unexpected curves, angles and walls.

This was one of a series of planned events to change that.

From the start, you could tell that this was an event different from other DrupalCamps and DrupalCons. For one, nearly all of us attending are designers. The percentage of women attendees was highest of any Drupal event I know of. And the energy was all about the design side of Drupal.

Most of the sessions fell into one of two general topic areas:

1. How to theme for Drupal as it is; and
2. How to make Drupal easier and better for theming and design.

Both topics are about beauty: the beauty of a successfully executed design, and the beauty of clean mark-up, clean css, clean output. For me, the greatest excitement came from seeing three different endeavors come together in a synergistic way.

Studio + Skinr + 960 = beauty inside and out

One of the wonderful aspects of working in open source is that you often find unexpected opportunities for collaboration and coordination of efforts to make the open source project better. This seems to have happened at Design for Drupal, as people weighed the exciting possibilities of the Studio theme, developed by our own Al Steffen and Matt Tucker, the Skinr module and the 960 theme.

Studio theme streamlines preprocess

Matt Tucker pulled together overnight a presentation on the Studio theme (that he and Al Steffen recently released), which got some buzz the day before in Jacine Rodriguez's presentation on the Skinr module (see below).

One thing that Studio does so elegantly is provide a method for handling attributes. As Matt Tucker said in his presentation, it's crazy to have to edit .tpl files just to add a class to something. It's especially crazy when you have 15 or 20 variant .tpl files for something such as nodes. To add a class, you have to go in and edit each and every .tpl file. It doesn't need to be that hard.

Skinr module's GUI for theming

I missed Jacine's presentation on the Skinr module, but the buzz coming out of it was palpable. There was no question that people had seen something very exciting to make modifying and customizing mark-up every easy to do.

960 grid system on Drupal

Nathan Smith, creator of the 960 grid system, did a fabulous presentation on how his prototyping system can make the flow from design to implementation easy, balanced and, yes, beautiful.

Then Todd Nienkerk presented his an implementation of the 960 grid into within a Drupal theme that was developed by Joon Park (aka "dvessel") and is co-maintained by Todd. [Edited for accuracy. Thanks, Todd!]

Three great tastes that taste great together

The potential of the idea of using NineSixty as a subtheme of Studio is intriguing. Such an approach would afford the benefits of both. (Currently, however, one would have to either hack or fork NineSixty to make it work.)

Adding Skinr promises to making design and theming work even easier.

Patching Drupal core

Some of the efforts at Design4Drupal were centered around improving Drupal's html output to make it easier to theme. Yes, contrary to what some developers seem to believe, it is possible to have too much mark-up -- way way way too much. Extra divs, spans, boatloads of classes and IDs, all that go way beyond what is necessary to target a particular element and can actually make it harder to do theming. Cascading stylesheets cascade.

There has been some push-back on the clean-html effort, so I'd like to offer a very rough analogy:

If Drupal's output standards were applied to PHP coding standards, I can only imagine the heated debate we'd be seeing in the Drupal development email list – that is, if any developers stuck around.

(See Moshe Weitzman's post discussing an aspect of this problem.)

We can do better in the html output. Just because Drupal is a complex CMS and framework doesn't mean the HTML has to be complex. "ID and classitis", as Moshe calls it, is just not necessary.

Let me be clear: This is not need to be an either/or thing. Sure, themers will often need a bit of specific mark-up to be able to target specific elements. But only just enough. Extra stuff just starts to get in the way. Not only that, it's usually un-semantic.

And just wait until we start throwing RDFa markup on top of it all!

Because of theme inheritance, extra-granular HTML markup with extra-just-to-be-sure classes and IDs can be generated in a base theme. I hope the voices of HTML and CSS expertise are not ignored or dismissed. Theming -- what is often called "front-end development" -- is not just an art, it's a craft, and at the heart of that craft are HTML and CSS. We live and breathe this stuff. Our voices matter.

Patches in the queue

• Moshe Weizman, one of just a few Drupal developers who attended Design4Drupal, has already rolled a patch to Drupal 7 core to implement a piece of how Studio handles attributes handling.
• Morten posted another clean-up item: removing divs from inside of forms.
• Another theme-related issues looking for some loving attention, posted by John Albin, is: Add full theme inheritance and settings defaults to .info files.
• To help the development process on Drupal.org focus more on markup, there's now an issue, close to being committed as I write this, to add "needs markup review" or something similar as a state option for issues in the issue queues.

And these are in addition to some exciting efforts pre-dating the camp:

• Allow more granular theming of drupal_render'ed elements, which is committed and now ready for some documentation work including expert review by some "#d4d people".
• Update and polish default page.tpl.php and associated css has been committed already.
  Update and Polish Node Template Output is looking for some love.
• An entire tag for tpl-refresh.

All these are very encouraging, positive developments in the effort of making Drupal markup beautiful and more themer-friendly.

Making contributing themes easier

On another front, this week, ceardach started a new module project, Simple Committer:

The initial goal of this module is to simplify the process of committing a theme to Drupal's CVS. For a HTML/CSSer, CVS is too much of a barrier for contributing new projects, and we would like to lower that barrier as much as possible.

During Design 4 Drupal, we had discussed that we could create a means to allow a user to upload a zipped file and it would automatically (or manually if we need to....) commit the contents of the file to Drupal's CVS.

We should keep the development path open, and plan a long term goal that is not CVS, Drupal and theme specific. For the first 30 days, we can hard code Drupal/CVS, but keep in mind during our development that we'll eventually want to make this flexible so the project can grow with ease.

This idea was given voice by Jay Batson of Acquia [disclosure: pingVision is an Acquia partner] in his second-day keynote as part of an effort to make it easier for themers not familiar or comfortable with CVS to contribute their work to the community. This was part of a larger vision he shared:

A Drupal designer community site

Designers as a rule tend to be different personality types than developers. For one thing, designers strive to create unique, one-off works, not designs to be used and reused on all kinds of sites. For the most part, designers work alone and don't collaborate on design work (though the best are open to collaborative feeedback and constructive criticism). And, almost to a rule, designers are not comfortable in the programming world. A designer may be quite comfortable working with (x)html and CSS, sure, but PHP? SQL? Not likely.

Jay's idea is to foment a constructive, nurturing community space where Drupal designers can talk about design, share comps of what they're working on, discuss useful design tools and approaches, debate techniques, and generally help each other as designers.

Where this community ends up living -- if it happens -- was left open last weekend, but today Jay announced the launch of http://design.acquia.com, which trumpets "Drupal is Beautiful!".

Jay points out some of the challenges designers at Design4Drupal identified:

• A really, really well done, useful, base theme in core. (But there is debate about what it should contain - all possible CSS, or none?)
• When displaying a base theme (on Drupal.org), indicate the sub-themes derived from the base theme (and vice-versa). (Can people just start to do this in the description of the theme, until it gets automated, please?)
• ID & class adding facility per menu item (currently in queue)
• Put the skinr project - or something like it - into D7 core. There was also some growing affection for the Studio theme pack
• If Drupal emits markup, it should be themable. (This, apparently, isn't always the case now.)
• Drupal.org has a security team, and an ops team. Should there be a design team? What would its authority / charter be?
• A way to mark a contrib issue as having a design problem - not just a "user experience" problem (which is actually a completely different thing in the eyes of designers.) (This involves a change to the Project module.)
• Guidelines for developers on when to do X with design / output to make the lives of designers (who have to deal with a module's output) easier
• Modules should list what markup it is going to emit that needs styled. Preferably list this somewhere _not_ in the module code - e.g. on the module's config page, or ..., so that designers don't need to shift into command line mode to discover this info.
• For every module, should there be a description of relevant design info or assumptions?
• How do we get a critical mass behind making all these changes? Do it on d.o? The systems aren't set up there well, but there is where coders (who may need to make changes) live. Do we create "community" among designers outside of d.o where we can change and modify systems quickly? Does this Balkanize efforts, or accelerate them?

I find the idea compelling.

All volunteer effort

Huge piles of thanks and hugs go out to Susan McPhee, who was at the heart of organizing this event, Morten, who has been championing the designer perspective in the Drupal community, and the fabulous D4D sponsors.

More:

on Design4Drupal

• Twitter search #d4d
• Groups.Drupal.org online community
• Jake "himerus" Strawn's post on Design 4 Drupal
• Matt Farina's write-up.

on IRC

Also check out the IRC chatroom #drupal-design on irc.freenode.net.

on UX

And all this is in addition to the Drupal 7 usability improvements being spearheaded by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt. A UX sprint is about to happen in Utrecht, The Netherlands. All over the world, Drupal's design is getting all kinds of love and attention.

Related:  Introducing the Studio Theme Pack

I now own two recumbent bicycles: a HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte, which is short, and a Rans Stratus XP, which is quite long indeed.

I got the Street Machine last weekend, purchased at my "local" recumbent bicycle shop that's 50 or so miles away in Fort Collins: Spring Creek Recumbents.

While recumbent bicycles are not exactly unknown or unseen in the bicycling mecca of Boulder, there isn't a single bike shop that sells recumbents. I don't know why.

In fact, Spring Creek seems to be the only serious recumbent bike shop anywhere in Colorado. I'm just glad they're in relatively easy driving range.

They're also very knowledgeable and friendly. They have dozens of models of recumbents and even quite a few trikes. And they have quite a few that you can rent by the hour, so you can try some of the models out for extended periods before making any buying decisions.

Anyway, twice before this spring I went up to Fort Collins to test ride some of the various SWB recumbents they had. I confess I was lusting in my heart for a SWB bike.

Don't get me wrong. I love my Rans Stratus XP. I've ridden quite a few miles on that bike, considering that it's been largely winter since I bought it. But I wanted something shorter. Lighter. Easier to maneuver when not riding (e.g., when parking it at the office).

So now that I've done a bit of riding on the Street Machine (which yes is a pretty dorky name – what you may or may not expect from a German company), I can say that it is definitely quite different from the Rans.

No surprises there. For example, the riding position on the Street Machine is a bit more compressed than on the Rans, which has me working different muscles, which I figure is a good thing. The Rans is really more like sitting in an easy chair with pedals. The Street Machine is much more of a sport machine.

What did surprise me was that the biggest adjustment for me would not be the higher bottom bracket, which has me pedaling much higher off the ground, or the under-the-seat steering (more on that below), but rather the short wheelbase with the small front wheel.

Every time I hit a deep dip, such as the rain gutters that cross the street in a nearby neighborhood, I get this feeling that I might actually endo on this thing!

The feeling is exacerbated by the front fork shock absorbers, which bear the brunt of the shock but leave the front end of the bike dipping a bit further than I'm so far comfortable with. I trust the engineering, so I figure I just need to get a bit more accustomed to this feeling, but it was something of a surprise.

One feature I love, though, is the under-the-seat steering. This tends to bring the front wheel back up under the rider a bit more than more "conventional" SWB bents like the Bacchetta Giro, but I liked being able to relax my arms while steering.

And, I confess, the pivot joint at the head stem of the handlebars typical in the SWB made me very uncomfortable.

Spring Creek had configured the bike with the mesh seat, which appealed to me as well.

The final decider for me on the HP Velotechnik vs. the Bacchetta Giro, which was my other leader, was the full suspension. It really makes a difference on the regular bumps and seams you get on streets and bike paths. I'll just have to get used to the feeling on the bigger dips ... and avoid them when I can.

All in all, the HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte is a wonderful ride. Doing some Googling for this post, I found Bentguy's post on his own, where he says:

I ride an HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte... (ooooh, sounds cool). It is cool. It's a short wheel base recumbent with full suspension and rides like a lazyboy on rockets. It's as fast as a bike that is this comfortable can be. And it's a mule in that it can carry a ton of crap... and I do.

I'm going to be using the Street Machine as a commuter bike, and the Rans Stratus XP for longer rides. At least that's what I've been thinking. But the HP Velotechnik Street Machine Gte is billed as the ultimate touring bike, so maybe I'll be changing my mind in the coming months.

Pattern similarity:Also perhaps of interest.... Rode my Rans Bought a recumbent bicycle today About the author

Laura Scott is works in interactive design, web development and video, and is President of pingVision, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura also can be found at:

pingVision blog | Twitter | Drupal.org | BlogHer | Flickr | LinkedIn | Facebook

Drupal is not generally taught in schools. Open source is largely off-topic in universities. Many, if not most, of the leaders in open source, including Drupal, are self-taught experts who bootstrapped their learning process. This doesn't mean they aren't bona fide computer scientists and programmers. On the contrary. But Drupal books aren't on many syllabi.

So we seek to grow the Drupalverse one event at a time, through monthly Drupal meetups ... and, once a year (and hopefully more frequently in the future), collaborating with other sponsors and several volunteers on throwing DrupalCamp Colorado, a two-day, hands-on Drupal conference/meet-up/sprint for people of all levels and all disciplines – designers and coders, website administrators and sysadmins, business people and freelancers, community leaders and entrepreneurs.

When: June 27-28
Cost: only $20

At any hour over the weekend event, there will be simultaneous presentations on topics including development, design, theming, site building, community and business issues, all relating to Drupal and the cutting-edge interwebs 'verse where Drupal lives and breathes.

Plus there will be a lot on e-commerce, because this year DrupalCamp Colorado is combining with Ubercamp, the annual Ubercart conference!

And all these presentations are aimed for audiences ranging from the novice to the expert.

Also there will be "birds of a feather" sessions (BOFs), ad hoc gatherings on a smaller scale where people can explore what interests them with like-minded folks.

We're expecting over 200 attendees!

If you are working with Drupal in any way, or are just curious about it, DrupalCamp Colorado 2009 is an event not to miss! Sign up now! It will be the most productive 20 bucks you ever spent.

(Want to help? Start here, and join us in IRC at #drupal-colorado.)

Related:  DrupalCamp Colorado 2008 DrupalCamp Colorado and LinkedIn pingVision presenters at DrupalCamp Colorado 2008

This week we learned that we won a Gold Horizon Interactive Award for Pregnancy.org. The Horizon Awards hold a special place in our heart as our first award we ever won was a Horizon Award. This one makes our eighth Horizon award – and third gold (the others were PopSci and BlogHer.

Our thanks go out to the Horizon judging committee!

Related:  pingVision wins five Horizon Interactive Awards pingVision wins design awards Horizon Awards PopSci.com relaunches on Drupal New BlogHer.org launches beta

For the third year in a row, Drupal has won a CNET Webware 100 Award, which is, we feel, a strong indication of the power, resourcefulness and creativity of the Drupal community.

Congratulations, Drupal!

Related:  Drupal CMS wins CNET Webware 100 again!

Last week we moved into new offices...

...upstairs from Techstars (@techstars) [who can nourish our minds]...

...and Sidney's Coffee Shop (@sidneyscoffee) [who can caffeinate our brains].

Once again, after nearly two years, we're all on the same floor, in the same space. Don't ever underestimate the value of that!

We made the move over the first weekend of May. In the weeks before, the space was being prepped -- walls torn down, paint thrown up, carpet thrown across -- transforming it from the forlorn abandoned space we could work with into a sharp, clean, bustling space we could work in.

Meetup tonight

Tonight we'll be hosting our first Drupal User Group Meetup in our new offices. All are welcome!

It starts at 6.

Free pizza and (soft) drinks!

For those traveling by bus, we're now catty corner from the main downtown Boulder bus terminal.

We're in the big tall ugly building with the pastel panels on the side that decades ago some architect thought would look cool. pingVision is located on the Mezzanine level.

Follow the Druplicon!

Farewell to the Pine Street home

Just over 29 months ago, we moved into the building at 14th and Pine. All we had was Suite 1. After bootstrapping the company from a livingroom office, we finally had our own space: 4 rooms plus a full bathroom.

The building was slated for demolition in six months or so, to make way for a new development, so we got a great deal on the space -- perfect for a start-up!

As we grew, we took over more of the building, one suite at a time, until we had five separate suites -- each with multiple rooms, each with separate utility bills, each with a full bathroom (including bathtub and shower). It was nice to have the room, but it was hard to have everyone scattered across three floors, in separate small rooms.

A lot has happened in these walls.

...Meetups, a DrupalCamp, oodles of client meetings, getting snowed in, internal moves, hirings, architecting, running cables, mounting whiteboards, designing, coding, theming, and lots and lots of laughter.

We take away many fond memories.

So now we move on to the next phase, with brighter horizons and better views of the Flatirons, remembering that place that was our home for over two years.

More photos on Flickr.

This is off my beat here at BlogHer, but it's bothering me, so here goes....

There's been much a-Twitter about the alarm surrounding the Swine Flu. People griping that SARS, Ebola, bird flu, [fill in the blank] didn't wind up being much, so why get worked up now? Everybody's over-reacting, they say.

I think the cynical response is overly-cynical and perhaps a bit to happy to declare "boy who cried wolf" and laugh or sneer.

Reality check:

Highly contagious? Check!

Fatal to healthy adults? Check!

No vaccine in sight before fall? Check!

Spreading quickly? Check!

This is a little thing that is very bad and could get very big very quickly. I don't see the alarm as overblown (though Egypt's destruction of all the pigs seems a bit ridiculous). We're an interconnected world now.

Shutting down the schools seems to be an obvious step. This is how you try to stop pandemic: By eliminating the mass-infection opportunities that we have.

If nothing comes of the swine flu, I think it could in part point to why such aggressive measures were indicated. It's if it gets really bad when we can say shutting the schools was perhaps too little too late.

So count me as skeptical of the proud, cynical skepticism out there. Just because you've run stop signs without consequences doesn't mean you want to continue doing it blithely.

/soapbox

Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott blogs at rare pattern and pingVision, and Twitters under the handle @lauras. This post is cross-posted at rare pattern.

Twitter

There's been much a-Twitter about the alarm surrounding the Swine Flu. People griping that SARS, Ebola, bird flu, [fill in the blank] didn't wind up being much, so why get worked up now? Everybody's over-reacting, they say.

I think the cynical response is overly-cynical and perhaps a bit to happy to declare "boy who cried wolf" and laugh or sneer.

Reality check:

Highly contagious? Check!

Fatal to healthy adults? Check!

No vaccine in sight before fall? Check!

Spreading quickly? Check!

This is a little thing that is very bad and could get very big very quickly. I don't see the alarm as overblown (though Egypt's destruction of all the pigs seems a bit ridiculous). We're an interconnected world now.

Shutting down the schools seems to be an obvious step. This is how you try to stop pandemic: By eliminating the mass-infection opportunities that we have.

If nothing comes of the swine flu, I think it could in part point to why such aggressive measures were indicated. It's if it gets really bad when we can say shutting the schools was perhaps too little too late.

So count me as skeptical of the proud, cynical skepticism out there. Just because you've run stop signs without consequences doesn't mean you want to continue doing it blithely.

/soapbox

About the author

Laura Scott is works in interactive design, web development and video, and is President of pingVision, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura also can be found at:

pingVision blog | Twitter | Drupal.org | BlogHer | Flickr | LinkedIn | Facebook

A couple weeks ago, Matt Tucker and I gave some folks at our local Drupal users group a preview of our recently contributed theme pack called Studio. We're announcing the official 1.0 version release of the theme and we felt it would be interesting to provide some background.
<!--break-->

A bit of history

I began working with Drupal back in January 2007 as version 5 was just coming out. My comfort level and skills increased in the theming layer over the course of time. These experiences, married with community input, identified new elements that we thought beneficial to a base theme. This theme was contributed to the community as Hunchbaque.

Hunchbaque became pingVision's standard base theme through Drupal 5's life cycle. It provided the company with time savings by avoiding repetitive efforts on each project. There were, however, limitations. The most significant being development of a brand new version of the theme for every site.

As Drupal 6 approached a stable release, I began porting Hunchbaque. I approached this assuming I could leverage the relationship between base themes and sub-themes. However, as I continued development, I found I could do so much more. Early versions, in Drupal 6, illustrated new flexibility that didn't exist in Drupal 5.

I decided that to take full advantage, it would be best to start from scratch. The Studio theme pack was created. The theme has grown from a simple theme to a full pack of themes. They include Paint, a simple three-column layout; Workspace, an administrative theme; and, soon, a mobile theme.

After several months of maturation and help from co-themer Matt Tucker, we feel it is time to release it to the community. So with the history lesson over, it is time to tell a little more about what this theme contains.

The usefulness of base themes

The Studio set of themes is intended to provide a starting point to quickly begin work on your custom themes. It provides a theme called Canvas as a base that does not get altered and can be upgraded. It should provide a good foundation to quickly get started on a new and original look for a site. The other two (Paint and Workspace) are provided as examples of how to build off of it.

You may be wondering why one should even bother with a base theme. It is a simple matter of preserving reusable code. For many of the themes we have done at pingVision there was a common set of code that every theme contained. Previously this was handled by starting with our in-house theme and modifying it as needed. Unfortunately, this also meant we had to role any useful bits we devoloped in individual projects back into our base. Now that there is a base theme that is exactly the same from project to project, we can simply commit the code and not worry about conflicts.

Cleaning up the theme

The first thing that is possibly noticed is that the template files are now placed in a subdirectory. Not only that, but we have decided to break this up into "custom" and "overrides" directories. This is best illustrated by looking at the CVS repository. We found this made finding needed files easier for us and, best of all, does not require any extra declarations in the theme. This is a Drupal core functionality in version 6 and our arrangement is merely a matter of taste. Feel free to arrange these files as you wish in your subthemes.

Next on the list of generally messy parts of the theme is the template.php. Through the course of building any theme, this gets filled up with a lot of logic in preprocess and theme functions. The simplest way to get this file back to a managable state is to break up the file. We chose to do this a couple different ways.

The biggest culprits that were filling up the template.php file were the many preprocess functions. These got rather large when building out the base classes for the theme and most could justify being a file themselves. For this reason there is a folder named "preprocess" in canvas and the subthemes. In here are several .inc files named for their related hooks. We also wanted to automate the process of including these files so that we did not have to tell PHP to include each manually. The following snippet found in Canvas' template.php allows for this:

<?php
function canvas_preprocess(&$vars, $hook) {
  if(is_file(drupal_get_path('theme', 'canvas') . '/preprocess/preprocess-' . str_replace('_', '-', $hook) . '.inc')) {
    include('preprocess/preprocess-' . str_replace('_', '-', $hook) . '.inc');
  }
}
?>

This function is the generic preprocess function that can handle any hook in Drupal. The function checks in the preprocess folder for a file named after the hook. If that file exists, it is loaded into the system. Unfortunately this functionality does not translate to subthemes well. The plus is that it is easy to duplicate for your own themes by copying the above code into your own theme's template.php and changing the word "canvas" to the name of your theme.

The next step in cleaning up the theme is to offload the bulk of custom theme functions and overrides to separate files. Unlike preprocess functions, normal theme functions rarely justify having an individual file for each one. This is why we broke them up into custom theme functions and overrides similar to the tpl files. These files can be found in the folder names "functions".

We take what some would consider nonstandard ways to include these files and that is by overriding the definition of theme function in the theme registry. This is done by simply defining a "file" key in the hook_theme() function. For instance, we wanted to remove the containing <div /> from the theme_item_list(), so we re-register it like so in the Canvas theme:

<?php
funtion canvas_theme() {
  return array(
    'item_list' => array(
      'arguments' => array(
        'items' => array(),
        'title' => NULL,
        'type' => 'ul',
        'attributes' => NULL,
      ),
      'file' => 'functions/theme-overrides.inc',
    ),
  )
}
?>

Even though this is what some would consider overkill, we like this for a reason other than using the "file" declaration: it gives us a functional list of overridden functions.

Additional defining attributes

There are several ids and classes declared to accommodate many of the situations we have found to be needed in the majority of sites. Logged in status, section designators, types of nodes, etc. With the way these are all added, it should be very easy to add more of your own or even remove some. This system is also upgradeable to accommodate new versions of the Canvas core. Simply add the $attributes variable to the container to the containing element of your template.

In the process of providing all these classes and ids, We found the core drupal_attributes() function inadequate. We had to perform and extra step to format the array of classes into a string since drupal_attributes() only handles strings for the values. For this reason we created theme_render_attributes(). It is very close in functionality to the original function except that it can accept an array or a string for a value.

The value of this expands beyond simple classes and ids also. One example of this is RDFa support in a theme. Details on how this would work is beyond the scope of this post, but it is something we hope to cover in the future.

Stylesheets for Internet Explorer

There is also support for Internet Explorer specific stylesheets. There is a good example on how to use this in the Paint theme's preprocess-page.inc.

<?php
$vars['ie_styles'] = array(
  'lte IE 6' => array(
    'screen' => array(
      path_to_theme() . '/css/lte-ie6.css',
    ),
  ),
);
$vars['styles'] .= theme('ie_styles', $vars['ie_styles']);
?>

The above process is pretty straight forward. We are constructing an array consisting of a conditional, media type and the path based on the Drupal root. This will allow for multiple stylesheets with similar properties to be grouped together. To get the stylesheets into the page output, simply render them with theme_ie_styles() and append it to the end of the $styles variable.

Region theming

There is now a theme_region() function. This provides a region.tpl.php that you can use to customize and wrap your regions how you wish. No more need to put extra if statements in the page.tpl.php files in your theme. If you need different markup for a certain region, just add a region-[region name].tpl.php to your theme and wrap as needed.

As an example of how this can clean up a file, look no further than Canvas' page.tpl.php. There is less logic, but all the appropriate wrappers are in place. We feel this creates a file that is easier to parse for the themer.

Cutting the fat

In addition to all of this, we have overridden theme functions and template files to trim out as much of the markup as possible. Currently this is limited to major themes in core Drupal and there are many more on the docket to override. In time this will be expanded even further to cover popular modules like Views and CCK.

How do I use this?

To begin using the capabilities of this theme, all you have to do is add base theme = canvas to your theme's .info file. Simple as that. If you wanted to have more of a structured start, you can make a copy of the Paint or Workspace themes and change all instances of the themes name in the included files. As an example, this is the beginning of the Paint theme's .info file:

name = Paint
description = This is a starter derivative theme of Canvas. If you would like to make your own custom theme, copy this one and change the name of the folder and .info file then provide your own information in the .info file.
engine = phptemplate
base theme = canvas
version = 1.x-dev
core = 6.x

Now, we must stress that making a duplicate is the proper method for this as we would hate for you to accidentally overwrite your hard work in an upgrade to the theme system.

Conclusion

One of the questions that will be asked is "How does this compare to the other base themes available?" This is a theme that grows and evolves with our company and it fits with what we do. This industry and technology is evolving at a fast pace. There are always new ways to implement various aspects of a site and we want a theme that can change as fast as we can. In the end there will be a lot of similarities between this and other themes out there in the wild. On the flip side, we feel there are enough differences to justify a new contribution to the community.

This concludes our not-so-brief rundown of the theme. In the future, we will be posting some more posts and videos on how to use it. There will also be more information on upcoming improvements later.

[edit] Studio was also presented at Design For Drupal in Boston and DrupalCamp Colorado in Denver. Slides from those presentations are available in pdf here

Related:  Studio theme pack Hunchbaque Hunchbaque: Ugly, Yet Beautiful Matt Tucker

A simple assortment of themes to expedite the creation of custom themes.

Googlesemantic webYahoo

First, some context

Henry Porter, an opinionator granted a regular podium by the Guardian, has written a bit of a rant claiming that we're victims of Google, a "monopoly."

Google presents a far greater threat to the livelihood of individuals and the future of commercial institutions important to the community. One case emerged last week when a letter from Billy Bragg, Robin Gibb and other songwriters was published in the Times explaining that Google was playing very rough with those who appeared on its subsidiary, YouTube. When the Performing Rights Society demanded more money for music videos streamed from the website, Google reacted by refusing to pay the requested 0.22p per play and took down the videos of the artists concerned.

It does this with impunity because it is dominant worldwide and knows the songwriters have nowhere else to go. Google is the portal to a massive audience: you comply with its terms or feel the weight of its boot on your windpipe.

The article is full of these kinds of claims, all largely based on what seems to be either a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Web, or a lack of understanding of the word "monopoly."

The core of Porter's ignorance, willful or not, is revealed in this statement:

Despite its diversification, Google is in the final analysis a parasite that creates nothing, merely offering little aggregation, lists and the ordering of information generated by people who have invested their capital, skill and time.

This is true only if you think that things exist on their own, and that their relationships to you, their relationships to each other, do not exist, or are not worth looking at, let alone making available for use -- let alone making relevant to our day-to-day lives.

Google provides a means of finding relevance in that sea of stuff out there on the Web. It's like a mega-index of the "book" of the Web. That relevance was largely hidden from us before search engines. To find relevance, one had to ask friends, browse libraries, analyze the Dewey Decimal System, dig up Yellow Pages, rummage through desk drawers to find that one tidbit of information you want right now.

That is hardly "nothing."

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."

Thomas Jefferson was also against a strong judiciary, which in hindsight sounds pretty foolish, imho. But Jefferson aside, there's no indication that what newspapers are in function -- delivery systems for filtered information -- is not going anywhere. It's just the newspaper industry, and the infrastructure and market that enabled the paper to be printed, that is going away. News is still happening. It's just that how we're getting it is changing.

There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny.

I don't like how US-owned search engine companies are going along with the Chinese Government's restrictions on the Internet, either, but let's be clear: It's the Chinese government that is censoring the Internet. Google is going along with it, along with much of the rest of the American economy, let's face it. This is about corporate collaboration with government constraints on what we consider "American values," and not about a Google monopoly or how Google is anything but pretty darned typical these days.

Now in many ways Porter is like many other people who have enjoyed the privilege of being given a special podium from which to pontificate and opinionate, who is upset that the market is shifting such that people who haven't been given such privilege are able to not only publish, but actually find an audience for what they publish.

How dare they? "Those bloggers!" is the cry we've heard over and over, often while pointing to the most outrageous or inane examples as cases-in-point -- ignoring that the vast majority of people "in print" also tend to produce an abundance of useless, inane, erroneous, misinformed information as well.

Until search engines, the only filtering agent people had was the editorial board of the local paper or the book publisher or the magazine. Now our filtering agent reaches beyond those sources -- although those sources, when right, get the most relevance -- to include others, including people who never went to journalism school, and never were given a paycheck by a media conglomerate. Oh the humanity!

So now Google is the dominant search engine, and thus potentially is a huge influencer in what sources we can find to be relevant to our needs, wants, desires ... to our lives. Such power Google has!

But is Google a search engine monopoly? Really?

Remember in the '90s? What was the dominant search engine then? Yahoo. Microsoft, with all its market dominance on the desktop, really was having trouble competing.

Google pushed Yahoo aside. How? By providing better search results. You searched Yahoo and got some good results and lots of spam and pr0n. You searched Google and got better results.

Relevance was the ticket to Google's successful insurgence. And relevance is why Google still dominates.

Relevance is a commodity. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it. Relevance is not even a scarce commodity. There's always more relevance. Better relevance.

Want to defeat Google? Build a tool that gives better results. In other words, be more relevant than Google.

Yes, Google has a magnificent physical infrastructure worth a crapload of money.

But even in these hard economic times, there are plenty of craploads of money out there to build a new tool to defeat Google. It wouldn't even take a huge crapload of money, as craploads of money go, since server infrastructure costs are going down.

No, the scarcity is in the innovation. The imagination. The engineering to guide what that crapload of money would build.

Microsoft has been trying and failing, and nobody can accuse Microsoft of being short on craploads of money.

It's the relevance that Google has, and it has it only ephemerally. All it will take is a tool with more relevance, backed by a relatively small crapload of money, to whittle at Google's market dominance, or even knock it off of your default home page. Maybe it will be a new search engine. Or a new social media paradigm. Or something we haven't even imagined yet.

All we know is that we don't know what it's going to be like just a few years from now. Blaming Google for that is like blaming the weather vane for this afternoon's rain shower.

Hat tip to Dave Winer and others for Tweeting the Guardian link.

About the author

Laura Scott is works in interactive design, web development and video, and is President of pingVision, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura also can be found at:

pingVision blog | Twitter | Drupal.org | BlogHer | Flickr | LinkedIn | Facebook

TwimailerTwitter

Twimailer is a nifty service. When someone follows you on Twitter, Twimailer sends you an email that has more info than what Twitter sends you, including how many people are following that person, and their recent tweets -- all helpful for you to decide if you might be interested in following that person.

However, Twimailer says that to use their service, you have to change your email in your Twitter account to point to them. As many have pointed out, even if you trust Twimailer, it's not really a secure practice. After all, password resets go to the email address of record.

Chris Messina has posted a way to use Twimailer securely using GMail. If you use Gmail, check out Chris' post.

However, if you use a desktop application for your email, and use an email service aside from Gmail, you still can use Twimailer securely. I'm going to use Mail.app as the example here, but this can be done in just about any desktop mail app -- any that can do "redirect" on a message from filters or rules.

1. The first part is the same: Sign up for Twimailer, as Chris explains:
   To get started, they just need an email address to send your notifications to. Twimailer will assign you a unique email address like twitter1234567@twimailer.com. Set this aside (copy it to TextEdit or something).

   Don't follow their instructions in their howto video.

2. Next, go to your email program and find an email message from Twitter with the subject line saying that someone "is now following you on Twitter!". In Mail.app, open up Preferences and select Rules. Click on "Add Rule".
3. In the window that pops up, filter so that any message that "Contains" in the "From" field something like twitter-follow-youremailaddress=example.com@postmaster.twitter.com is where the rule is enabled. (The "youremailaddress=example.com" snippet is how Twitter references your email address at youremailaddress@example.com.)
4. In the lower area, "Perform the following actions:", change the action to "Redirect Message" to the email address Twimailer gave you. You might also have the Rules system stop processing that message. In the end, your rule might look something like this:
   
5. Optionally you could have the original Twitter email deleted or moved to another folder.

That's it, that's all. The workflow may be different in different email apps, but the redirect function is the key.

As Chris says:

It seems to me that this kind of feature improvement is something that Twitter should really do itself, but of course it’s great to see someone from the community pitch in and add incremental value until Twitter gets around to it.

At the same time, putting Twimailer in between you and Twitter’s password recovery mechanism seems unnecessarily dangerous (i.e. Twimailer could go down, get hacked, sold or might be simply be implemented insecurely (consider Spotify’s recent security breach)). I actually have no insight into these things about Twimailer, but I’d rather not take any unnecessary chances.

I welcome comments about how this works for you in Mail.app or in other mail programs.

About the author

Laura Scott is works in interactive design, web development and video, and is President of pingVision, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura also can be found at:

pingVision blog | Twitter | Drupal.org | BlogHer | Flickr | LinkedIn | Facebook

This 1-minute video is a brief introduction to Drupal, the free open source content management system (CMS) and application framework initially created by Dries Buytaert.

An earlier cut premiered at the SxSW Trade Show this month, but it was playing silently, meaning that those who saw it got only part of the story.

Anyway, we hope you like it, and welcome your feedback!

Video No.:  1

Twitter

Yesterday, Twitter turned three. A week before was my two-year Twitterversary. So that pretty much made me a late early adopter. And while I'm really enjoying Twitter now, back then I didn't get it. Not yet. Pretty much not at all.

I admit, these past few years I've pretty much rushed to sign up for any and every new online social or productivity service that sounded interesting. They all had strangely spelled (or simply strange) names like Flickr and del.icio.us and furl and Vox and Joost and Plurk. And those are the ones I remember, maybe even still use.

But pretty much most of them never stuck. It was just too hard to work them into my life. Too weird. Too difficult to use. And many I never tried out at all. Too uninteresting or too ... creepy, some of them.

When I signed up for Twitter, it was already something of a buzz in tech circles. I had looked at it for many months but never got around to actually signing up. It never really clicked in my head that it would be interesting. And after I did finally sign up, I found it alternatingly boring, distracting and challenging to work into my life. While I searched for people tweeting interesting things and followed them, I avoided anybody too prolific. At that point, following only people who posted a tweet an hour was about the max I could handle. A tweet or two a day was more like it. Otherwise I couldn't keep up.

In trying to make Twitter work for me, I did not follow people tweeting boring things, like "Drinking coffee" or "Waiting in line at the grocery store." (I still don't find that banality interesting. Who cares?) I was interested in people tweeting about interesting things – news, blog posts, events, or even just how they felt about that morning coffee or waiting in line at that moment.

Then something changed.

At some point, I crossed a threshold – a breakthrough point where I was no longer trying to track and read every single tweet of those I was following, and now getting a more impressionistic gestalt of the aggregate twittering. And I think that's the real trick about Twitter. You're a bird in a tree with thousands of birds around you, all tweeting. The tweets that interest you catch your attention. You may miss things, but the big stuff gets retweeted. And the more people you follow, the more sources that might toss out something interesting.

It's a liberating moment, when you reach this point in Twitter. You're freed from the need to track everything. What you catch you catch, and what you miss you miss (and likely would have missed anyway, if you weren't twittering at all).

It took a while, but Twitter eventually grew to take a place in my daily life that did not even exist before. There is no clear real-life (as in 3D, face-to-face) analogue. Twittering is communication in a way totally enabled by the technology, the applications. We simply could not be connecting transiently, ephemerally with so many people at the same time without being alone in a crowded room.

Now I'm using Twitter more and more, and while my Twittersphere has grown I've found Twitter to be ever more interesting and relevant to my life. But I was a late adopter, even after adopting, and stumbled quite a bit along the way. It can be a bit unnerving at times, especially on those occasions when someone unfollows me.

So if you're Twittering but not quite getting it, maybe you should try just diving in. Follow a lot of people. Browse. Engage.
And Tweet your passion.

And when you're too busy, don't worry about it. Twitter will be there when you're ready.

Here are some women you might want to follow:

• @kathysierra
• @blogdiva
• @laurennroth
• @agahran
• @thatwoman
• @webchick
• @add1sun
• @stacedout
• @pingkate
• @vdebolt
• @MichelleCox
• @AmyStephen
• @missrogue
• @gwenbell
• @mollydotcom
• @tresha
• @lauriewrites
• @LizaK
• @emmajanedotnet
• @leisa
• @lizriz
• @lizhenry
• @debroby
• @kanter
• @CaliLewis
• @zadi

Cross-posted from BlogHer.

About the author

Laura Scott is works in interactive design, web development and video, and is President of pingVision, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura also can be found at:

pingVision blog | Twitter | Drupal.org | BlogHer | Flickr | LinkedIn | Facebook

Yesterday, Twitter turned three. A week before was my two-year Twitterversary. So that pretty much made me a late early adopter. And while I'm really enjoying Twitter now, back then I didn't get it. Not yet. Pretty much not at all.

I admit, these past few years I've pretty much rushed to sign up for any and every new online social or productivity service that sounded interesting. They all had strangely spelled (or simply strange) names like Flickr and del.icio.us and furl and Vox and Joost and Plurk. And those are the ones I remember, maybe even still use.

But pretty much most of them never stuck. It was just too hard to work them into my life. Too weird. Too difficult to use. And many I never tried out at all. Too uninteresting or too ... creepy, some of them.

When I signed up for Twitter, it was already something of a buzz in tech circles. I had looked at it for many months but never got around to actually signing up. It never really clicked in my head that it would be interesting. And after I did finally sign up, I found it alternatingly boring, distracting and challenging to work into my life. While I searched for people tweeting interesting things and followed them, I avoided anybody too prolific. At that point, following only people who posted a tweet an hour was about the max I could handle. A tweet or two a day was more like it. Otherwise I couldn't keep up.

In trying to make Twitter work for me, I did not follow people tweeting boring things, like "Drinking coffee" or "Waiting in line at the grocery store." (I still don't find that banality interesting. Who cares?) I was interested in people tweeting about interesting things – news, blog posts, events, or even just how they felt about that morning coffee or waiting in line at that moment.

Then something changed.

At some point, I crossed a threshold – a breakthrough point where I was no longer trying to track and read every single tweet of those I was following, and now getting a more impressionistic gestalt of the aggregate twittering. And I think that's the real trick about Twitter. You're a bird in a tree with thousands of birds around you, all tweeting. The tweets that interest you catch your attention. You may miss things, but the big stuff gets retweeted. And the more people you follow, the more sources that might toss out something interesting.

It's a liberating moment, when you reach this point in Twitter. You're freed from the need to track everything. What you catch you catch, and what you miss you miss (and likely would have missed anyway, if you weren't twittering at all).

It took a while, but Twitter eventually grew to take a place in my daily life that did not even exist before. There is no clear real-life (as in 3D, face-to-face) analogue. Twittering is communication in a way totally enabled by the technology, the applications. We simply could not be connecting transiently, ephemerally with so many people at the same time without being alone in a crowded room.

Now I'm using Twitter more and more, and while my Twittersphere has grown I've found Twitter to be ever more interesting and relevant to my life. But I was a late adopter, even after adopting, and stumbled quite a bit along the way. It can be a bit unnerving at times, especially on those occasions when someone unfollows me.

So if you're Twittering but not quite getting it, maybe you should try just diving in. Follow a lot of people. Browse. Engage.
And Tweet your passion.

And when you're too busy, don't worry about it. Twitter will be there when you're ready.

Here are some women you might want to follow:

• @kathysierra
• @blogdiva
• @laurennroth
• @agahran
• @thatwoman
• @webchick
• @add1sun
• @stacedout
• @pingkate
• @vdebolt
• @MichelleCox
• @AmyStephen
• @missrogue
• @gwenbell
• @mollydotcom
• @tresha
• @lauriewrites
• @LizaK
• @emmajanedotnet
• @leisa
• @lizriz
• @lizhenry
• @debroby
• @kanter
• @CaliLewis
• @zadi

Contributing Editor Laura Scott tweets as @lauras, and shares tweeting responsibilities for @pingv, @Drupal and @DrupalAssoc. When she's not Tweeting, she sometimes blogs at http://rarepattern.com and http://pingv.com.

I had an interesting time yesterday, trying to get a web producer job listing published on Craig's list. Apparently anonymous people can get your ad unpublished for arbitrary reasons. One comment in the open forums was that the ad was too long. Another said that the ad specified knowledge and experience that was too demanding.

Well, we do have several new positions open, and yes, some of them have pretty demanding requirements. But we don't believe that high standards are barriers to hiring. We require excellence from all of our people. Our clients expect it. We expect it from ourselves.

When it comes to Drupal-related positions, we are seeking:

A Senior Drupal Developer/Programmer who is already expert in Drupal, the Drupal API, Drupal best practices, and is an outstanding computer programmer/software engineer with professional experience. This is a position where your Drupal ID will be a major part of your resume. While we prefer to have people working in our Boulder, Colorado office, we're open to a virtual arrangement. Because virtual work complicates and, in our experience, hinders communications and productivity, we are seeking someone who (a) is a true professional (and all that is implied by that descriptive), (b) wants to keep regular full-time hours, (c) can come to Boulder for 2+ weeks at a time 3 or more times a year.

In the Developer/Programmer (PHP) position, we're looking for an experienced programmer or software engineer with a Bachelor's degree or equivalent, solid foundation in programming fundamentals (UML, MVC, OO), experience in open source, and a strong interest in becoming an expert in Drupal development. So this is a position looking for an ace programmer interested in a very steep and rapid learning curve experience. This job is full-time in the Boulder office.

Drupal designers, we are looking for a fabulous Interactive Designer who knows Drupal. Demonstrated xhtml, CSS and prototyping expertise is, of course, required. Adobe skills are a must, too, but this position is all about designing interactivity, always with an eye on UX. We also have a position for an experienced Graphic Designer who is expert in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign (and don't even talk to us about Dreamweaver), plus a solid foundation in xhtml, CSS and interactive design. Drupal experience, of course, is a big plus here, so you Drupal-savvy designers, we want to talk to you!

And we have a position for Web Producer – a people person who knows and has experience with Drupal, has experience in IA, can manage people, has an excellent ability to write, speak, and use images to clearly and persuasively communicate in technical and non-technical subjects with both technical and non-technical audiences, and truly understands the world of open source.

You'll be working on enterprise-level, often-high-profile projects with a really great, collaborative, award-winning team. Opportunities for travel, including to the twice-yearly DrupalCons, are among the benefits. Active participation in the Drupal community is among the expectations.

More details on each position can be found on their listing pages linked above. If you're interested in applying, please contact us!