Blog: Usability

Streamlined, Centralized Drupal Building Logic

Last month at DrupalCon Boston I presented with Jeff Miccolis on implementing a formal context system in Drupal. We had a lot of ideas to share and some proof of concept code to demo. Since then we’ve been working hard to clean up our code and our concepts.

The basic idea behind the context module is to allow different parts of the Drupal stack to expose key pieces of logic to other parts in a standardized fashion. Context_ui extends this core functionality by allowing users to create context definitions - bundles of views, content types, panels, menu items, and blocks - that can be used to model “sections” or “features” on your Drupal site, among other things.

Great Design Sessions Lined Up for DrupalCon

Without further delay, here is the lineup for DrupalCon Boston's Design and User Experience track: 

• Better Drupal Interaction Design with Flex (Chris Charlton)
• Building Capacity through Good Usability: Lessons from Instructional Design (Tim Lindgren)
• Burn the Help Manual: A Strategy for Self-Explaining UX Design (Bob Goodman)
• Converting Mock-ups to Drupal Themes (Maureen Lyons)
• Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Applications: Taking Advantage of Core Hooks and Context (Young Hahn)
• Design on the Edge of Drupal (Claudio Luis Vera)
• Designing for Drupal (Chris Fassnacht)
• Drupal and Open Laszlo: How an Open Source Flash Solution Fits with Drupal (Kris Vanderwater)
• Drupal.org Redesign Panel (Various)
• Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture (Owen Barton)
• jQuery and Drupal: A Match Made in Heaven (Kyle Browning and Dmitri Gaskin)
• "No Tears" Methods for User Centered Design (Michael Angeles)
• Report from Formal Drupal Usability Testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries (Cody Hanson)
• Scalable Theming: Theming for 100s of Node Types, CCK fields, and Views (Bevan Rudge)
• Sex, Drupal, and Rock n Roll: A Theming Love Story (King of Denmark)
• What's in a Theme: The Power of Enterprise-Level Theming (Michael Caccavano)

The track has a strong mix of sessions aimed at hardcore designers, novice Drupal themers, and longtime community members and developers. Whether you're interested in customizing Drupal's look and feel for an enterprise-level website like Lifetime TV or looking for a robust dynamic interface solution using jQuery, Flex, or Open Laszlo, the sessions will provide plenty of opportunities for learning and sharing.

Other highlights include Michael Angeles' start-to-finish program on the right ways involve users in the design process, Bevan Rudge's guide to Scalable Theming, aka "How Not to Get Burned When Someone Adds a New Content Type", and the King of Denmark's Sex, Drupal, and Rock n Roll: A Theming Love Story, which is bound to be a blast even if no one knows what to expect.

Longtime Drupal developers and users should definitely keep their eyes on Cody Hanson's session. Cody and several other notable presenters, including Dries himself, will be going over results from the University of Minnesota's formal user testing sessions which pitted Drupal's UI against the dreaded everyday user. The results will no doubt spark some interesting--and maybe heated--discussions on how to push Drupal's usability forward to the next level.

Keep your eyes open over the next two weeks for more information on these sessions. We hope to see you in Boston!

Only One Week Left to Place Your Votes

Everyone should go check out the latest proposals on the DrupalCon Boston site and vote on the sessions you want to see. From Bevan's "Contributing to Usability in Drupal" to the King of Denmark's "Sex Drupal & Rock n Roll," some old timers and new faces are weighing in on how to design for Drupal and how Drupal can be better tailored to designers. Let us know what other sessions you'd like to see by posting here or on the DrupalCon website - or read the goals of the Design Track and post your own session. Today is pre-selection day for the sessions, and there's only one week left for submitting sessions at all. So make sure to weigh in on your top picks.

The Design Track at DrupalCon 2008 will show off some examples of high-powered websites like Harvard's cluster of Drupal sites and TreeHouse's work on Lifetime TV. There is a lot of energy behind making Drupal easier to design for the end user. Steve's work on Garland and the color module and some ambitious ideas I've heard from Kieran at Aquia could make 2008 the year Drupal killed the designer. I've already found a solid life insurance policy.

I'll be pushing the UI and theming advantages of Drupal that are available to developers at DrupalCon. While Drupal is making design easier than ever for end users, Drupal also provides developers with a very flexible and powerful platform for producing custom web applications and tools. I’ll be talking about making Drupal easier and smarter to design for people that code. Keep an eye out for Development Seed's upcoming session proposal "Designing for Every Day Users." It will focus on UI details, how good design and good coding can go hand in hand, and what this means for people building applications with Drupal. I'll be sharing some examples and stories from two recent applications we’ve been working on.

I’m excited to meet everyone in Boston and am stoked by the energy that is in the air right now. I look forward to everyone's feedback!

Streamlining the Translation Process for Multilingual Websites

Recently we built a multilingual website for the International Council on Archives. Training their staff on how to use the website drove home - again - just how bulky it was to translate text in multilingual Drupal websites. So last week I worked on an update on the l10n_client to streamline the translating process and simply make translating content easier.

Here's a screencast that shows how you can now translate text with the update:

The l10n_client update includes several bugfixes/optimizations as well as some cool new features:

Bugfixes

• The string list now displays translated strings in the target rather than source language.
• Strings are now stored in a hidden DOM tree rather than a javascript array. The array was causing browser slowdowns on some pages with lots of strings.
• Several other small fixes and optimizations.

New Features

• String list "live search"
• Simple keybindings: F1 toggles the l10n_client panel, ESC clears a live search
• Selected-text quicksearch: Hilight a string to be translated and hit F1 to automatically find it in the string list

Many thanks to Gabor Hojtsy, lead Drupal 6 developer and maintainer of the l10n_client module. Also, a big thanks to Jose Reyero who backported l10n_client to Drupal 5. We're now using l10n_client on several multilingual Drupal 5 sites and have gotten very useful feedback from our users. These improvements should find their way back to the Drupal CVS version of l10n_client sometime next week. You can also find Jose's Drupal 5 backport of l10n_client in our repository here:

http://svn3.cvsdude.com/vvc/devseed/sandbox/l10n_client_backport/(Note: requires a patch to the locale module)

Technical Note

• If you're wondering why the search is case sensitive, it is because l10n_client makes use of the JQuery selector :contains. This is an incredibly powerful and fast selector - it more than doubled the speed of l10n_client's search (which was previously case-insensitive but much more costly).