Posts filed under Contributing
DrupalCon Paris Debriefing
A week after DrupalCon Paris, our team is still talking about the conference, and trying to find some good crêpes. You may say that any conference in Paris is worth going to, and I would not argue with you. Paris is a beautiful city. But DrupalCon also did not disappoint. There were plenty of interesting sessions, conversations, and people to make the trip worthwhile in any city.Here are some thoughts from a few of us at Aten who attended:
- Scott Reynen
I really enjoyed the Ice Cream Sprint before DrupalCon. It was my first experience working on Drupal core and I found the Drupal community makes it really easy to get involved. It was great to meet so many people I’d only seen as usernames previously.
- Brad Bowman
As always, I think my favorite part was connecting with people who I interact with in the issues queues and irc on a daily basis but rarely get to see.
It’s a great experience to connect face to face and learn from other peoples experience and ideas. Whether it was talking with people about dealing with large data imports, improving the design and development process, or managing an effective communications strategy, I was consistently walking away from conversations with a combination of affirmation for our current path, and plenty to think about for the future.
- Justin Toupin
I can’t think of a better, more inspirational setting for this kind of event. The conference was stacked with informative talks, and full of people doing a huge range of work with Drupal. The resulting breadth of perspectives was powerful.
I was particularly pleased (and surprised) to hear as much talk as there was about an “iterative approach.” We’ve been talking about, implementing, and refining an iterative process for several years now, with really positive results. It was good to hear about others’ experiences in a similar direction.
As Jon already pointed out, the city itself is beautiful — what better setting for discussing strategy around development, design and communication than the cafes, metro cars and museums of Paris.
We left excited and inspired about the projects we’re working on and the growing opportunities we have to help advance the Drupal community. It’s just hard to believe we have to wait until April for the next one. DrupalCon San Fransisco, here we come!
- Scott Reynen
Usability Testing at the University of Baltimore next month!
In late February I and a handful of other Drupal contributors will be headed towards Drupalcon a week early to do formal Usability Testing of Drupal at the University of Baltimore to help continue the research done by Becca Scollan and other graduate students there last year. We'll be doing 3 days of testing, followed by 3 more compiling the data and turning them into actionable items in the Drupal.org issue queues. Finally, we'll be presenting an overview of the issues we found at Drupalcon.
If you'd like to get involved there's a lot to get done between now and then. Specifically, the UX Team is working towards finding solutions to the following issues:
- Text links for 'Select all/None/Invert'
- Allow more users to see the node admin pages
- Help System - Patch #1
- Vertical Tabs
- Text format widgets
- And anything else tagged as a usability issue on Drupal.org.
Drupal 7 core maintainer Angela 'webchick' Byron has been nice enough to promise a focus of her review/commit time on usability issues this next month as we prepare for testing, so now's the time to focus on these issues.
We'll also be using this month to create and refine our test plan. A current working version of that document has been posted to the Usability group on https://groups.drupal.org. It's already starting to solicit some feedback, but we'd love to get as many eyes on it as possible.
And finally, if contributing isn't your forte, but you'd still like to know how you can help out, we're trying to raise sponsorship money to help fund the testing. Everyone attending the testing is volunteering their time, but we will have travel expenses as well as the need to put together a budget to pay test subjects for their time. If you're willing to help out financially you can do so using the ChipIn widget to the right.
