Planet Drupal

Ezra Glidesgame has been writing a module to integrate the Signup module for managing event registration with the Ubercart e-commerce module: Signup integration for Ubercart (short name: uc_signup). The uc_signup registration process was designed to support a wide variety of use cases (one user potentially signing up multiple other users for different events, in different quantities) while still being easy to use. We wanted to see what users thought of the preliminary uc_signup registration process, so in June we ran a small usability test here at the Growing Venture Solutions office. The test revealed several subtle and interesting findings that applied to the uc_signup module, the Ubercart checkout process, and specific aspects of the client site's configuration.

First, some background on the project

AUSSIE provides professional development in the field of K-12 education. One of their services is to offer workshops around the country, with registration done through their website. Uc_signup is being written to give AUSSIE more control of the look and administration of their sign-up process, and internalize their events management, which is currently being hosted by Eventbrite. The improved Aussie site is scheduled to launch in August.

About our Usability Participants

We recruited 4 participants having the following profile characteristics:

• Two men and two women between the ages of 29-36
• All with general office experience and good computer proficiency
• All use the internet daily, with a range of 3 to 40 hours per week
• Internet purchasing comfort level: comfortable to strongly prefer
• Three of the participants had previously signed up online for classes or workshops

I just finished reading Front End Drupal (buy on Amazon, companion site) and wanted to share some of my favorite points, some parts that could be enhanced, and some ideas I have for ways to expand it in a future edition. I've known Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer for some time now through the Drupal community and respected their work. So, I was quite interested to see how they would do in book medium: it's some impressive work. In my experience training and writing books, one of the hardest things is picking the right audience for the book and then making sure that your book has support for people above and below the level of your ideal audience. You need sidebars to help explain details on advanced topics and good section titles so that advanced people know when to stop skimming over the things they know and start reading again.

This photo shows a nice screenshot, some helper explanation text, and my next read in the background.

Favorite Parts of Front End Drupal

There are several general things and several specific things that I liked about this book:

• They cover not only "Front End Drupal" but also some best practices for Web design and information architecture in general.
• Mixed among the details of template files and overrides is solid advice about how to configure Drupal's core and several contributed modules so that a reader who is new to Drupal will learn much more than just theming.

Hello - I'm Evelyn and I have recently joined GVS as a designer and usability tester. I have been working as a freelancer for the past seven years, and now that my daughter is entering 1st grade I am excited to be spending more face time with grown-ups!

My first task as a designer with GVS was to design a site for Greg's book: "Cracking Drupal". This was also my first real-world experience theming for Drupal and with some help, it was pretty simple.

I began by chatting with Greg about what he wanted the site to do and how it should look. I also gave him a simple design worksheet to complete with questions such as "Who is your target audience?" and "How do you want people to describe your site?" (If I could ask only one question, this last one would be it.) Greg wanted the site to draw on the cover of the book, and wanted it to be elegant, streamlined and easy to navigate.

Book Cover: As a starting point it was an obvious choice to take the book cover and modify it into the header and footer. I pulled the color palette from the cover as well, and added a burnt orange accent to offset the strong blues and blacks. In general I try to avoid black text on white, so the body copy and some headers are actually a dark blue.

Elegant: I always strive for elegance. By elegance I don't mean just "tasteful, refined or dignified" (Oxford American Dictionary.) For me, elegance in web design is integral to good usability. Even grungy, busy sites, when done well, can be described as elegant. So for Cracking Drupal that meant a clear hierarchy and harmonious color scheme taken from the book.

I'm not much for boasting, but I will be honest: Drupalcamp Colorado is going to be amazing. You should do everything you can to attend.

Last year we had nearly 100 people together for DrupalCamp. This year the event is combined with an Ubercamp to gaurantee it will rock your socks off. We have space for nearly 400 people, so we hopefully won't have to cap registrations like last year. Did I mention you should come?

What the Heck is a Drupalcamp anyway?

There's some healthy debate in the community about the purpose of Drupalcamp, especially as Drupalcon becomes a bigger and more "corporate" event. One of the goals with Drupalcamp Colorado is to help provide a bit of a middle ground between the grassroots, loosely organized camps and the ultra-organized, corporate Drupalcon. Partially because the "mountain west" is so spread out and far from other places, this camp tends to be a regional event pulling in people from nearby states. We've structured it with up to 3 simultaneous tracks and plenty of space for Birds of a Feather gatherings to support everyone from new-user to hard-core designers/developers.

Registration and Session Submission Are Open

We just opened the camp site for registrations and session submissions. We've got a strong showing of Ubercart session proposals, which makes sense given that this is also an Ubercamp. Session submission is open for about the next 3 weeks. Then we'll have some time for voting, and the final list of sessions will be announced about 2 weeks before the camp itself. Already there is a solid list of compelling sessions from some great presenters.

I've been involved in a handful of issues on drupal.org. According to a search for issues where I participated, it's about 3,300 issues. That's a lot of typing. A lot of that typing was on duplicate issues where I probably wrote variations on the same words. Unfortunately when I'm feeling rushed through issues I can be a little less friendly to people than is ideal. Fortunately there's a little tool that can help make this less tedious and provide more thoughtful messages to the people who submit these bugs.

MyWords for Firefox

So, you install the MyWords plugin for Firefox, do a little configuration, and you're off!

Here's a quick screencast of how to use and configure the plugin.

Increased Productivity with MyWords for Firefox from Greg Knaddison on Vimeo.

My thanks to Sun for recommending the add-on!

This past spring there was Drupalcon DC, a truly amazing event by all counts. As we debated sponsoring Drupalcon we decided to go a different route: sponsoring the many camps that we hoped would happen in Central and South America this year. It was clear from the DrupalCon South America BOF held in DC that there was a lot of interest from South America to organize Camps as well.

So, given a need and a desire to help grow the community, we've made some great initial contributions towards 4 camps. If there are any other camps in the area that people are trying to plan this year please let us know so we can support your camp.

Drupalcamp Brazil, Drupalcamp Centroamerica

For the Drupalcamp Centroamerica Felix Delattre (xamanu) decided to use the money to provide scholarships to cover transportation and attendance costs for people from around Central America. We are happy that the money will help 2 people attend the camp who otherwise would not be able to: Eduardo Garcia and Isaak Ordoñez. Felix did something right: in it's first year the camp is over 100 attendees.

We can support your Drupal site, but first let’s make it right

When we first offered formal Drupal Support services we expected clients would know their site fairly well and need help with advanced administration and/or doing “new” things. In practice, we’ve quickly learned an important lesson about the diversity of Drupal site owners. Some are virtuosos, and need our help with very complex issues. Some have an existing site with major deficiencies, perhaps built by a vendor who is no longer in the picture. Some need some tutoring in Drupal basics, or even the concepts of dynamic websites.

So we have learned to sort out from the start whether clients will need a more intensive initial phase that includes a site review, an assessment of how well administrators and users understand their Drupal site, and quite possibly a detailed site tune-up. Here is how the technical side went with one client …

We've been slowly growing as a company over the last few months - it's worth taking some time to acknowledge the changes.

Steve Harley

Steve Harley joined the team last September and has been getting up to speed on code and community ever since, posting a monochrome print friendly Druplicon. I've known Steve for a while and worked with him on projects related to our neighborhood in Denver. Steve's role is primarily as a Drupal generalist, though he obviously has some skill as a designer which comes from years in the publishing industry. Most recently he worked on desktop development with Filemaker, Python and other scripting tools.

Ezra Barnett Gildesgame

After working with Ezra previously, it is great to be able to work with him again. Ezra is a Drupal generalist and proud maintainer of several modules on drupal.org. He joined the team last November and has already co-taught Denver area GVS trainings along with other development and support work. Most recently before GVS, Ezra worked as an independent consultant to Flat World Knowlwedge.

Dave Reid

The Growing Venture Solutions team has expanded over the last 6 months to add two new members. In the face of increasing demand for our services we are now looking to hire new people to join the team.

We are hiring two people. These descriptions are for the ideal candidate, so if you have some of the qualities and are looking to expand in these areas then please still contact us.

Website Designer With a Strong Usability Focus

Most of our projects are heavy on development, but our goal is to be a full service shop. We've satisfied this need so far by working with contractors, but now we want someone to join the team. One of your tasks will be to help polish our site (we've started work on this, but it would be unfair to keep you out of it). You'll also work with our clients on identity, user experience, and wireframing. And if you're interested you will help with some sales work.

Drupal Generalist: Site Builder, Developer, Support Engineer, Trainer

EDIT: This position is now filled.

We provide many services around Drupal: building sites, writing custom code and enhancing modules, providing support to our support clients, and providing training services. If you are a "Drupal generalist" interested in providing at least some of these services that's great. A resume is less interesting than a solid record of contribution to the Drupal project - please provide a link to your drupal.org user profile.

Locations and What it's like to work with Growing Venture Solutions

We like to think we're a pretty special company. The best way to describe us is a hybrid between being a freelancer and an employee. For more details, see this description.

As Drupal developers and themers, we spend a lot of our time referring to the Drupal API Reference which provides great information about functions to use and how to write code for Drupal. It can be a little daunting to look at that site if you are a new user: what are you searching for? what areas should you explore? For more seasoned developers there are times when api.drupal.org is not as useful: what if you are offline or just want a quick overview of the functions you use most often?

So, we built up this cheat sheet to provide a guide of important functions new users might not know and also to give a quick reference sheet for more advanced developers.

Download the Drupal API Cheat Sheet

You can download the cheat sheet in pdf format which is linked to api.drupal.org in case you need more information on a specific function.

After gathering suggested functions we had some room on the card and debated: more functions that are less valuable or some related topics. We decided to go for some related topics and added just a smidgen of Linux Command Line fun with useful commands and cvs tips. We also included the tiniest form example to get folks started down the road to awesome forms using the FormAPI.