CapitalCamp—the DrupalCamp for Washington, DC—was held last week at George Washington University, and we were proud to help sponsor. The camp was a great success, offering many insightful sessions and opportunities to talk with people doing amazing things with Drupal. As usual, we got to meet a lot of attendees, including independent developers, folks from Drupal shops and others using Drupal at work—especially in public sector and nonprofit settings. Three of us presented sessions over the weekend.
Design and Front-end Development
John Ferris gave a session on theming large-scale Drupal sites. Scalable Stylesheets - Theming Using Modular CSS focuses on advanced techniques for taking control of your Drupal markup. Doing so, allows you to take advantage of modern CSS architectures, such as OOCSS or SMACSS.
Ken Woodworth presented Designing and Implementing Beautiful, Flexible Interfaces, a session about implementing designs using Photoshop, CSS and HTML.
The camp was kicked off with a keynote session from Lara Swanson, Dyn's UX Manager. Her session, Improving the User Experience through Front End Performance, provided an insightful look at designing for performance. We were happy to see so many quality design and front-end related sessions at CapitalCamp this year.
OpenAid
There were plenty of sessions beyond design and front-end topics too. My session, called Drupal Strategies for Nonprofits, covered ways NGOs and other program-focused nonprofits can get more out of Drupal using distributions, and by collaborating with and contributing back to the Drupal community. I walked through our experience developing an internal website development platform with our client K4Health, and contributing it back to the community as the OpenAid distribution. OpenAid enables NGOs to quickly create websites that can effectively highlight programs around the world.
If you're interested in learning more about OpenAid, in downloading the code, or in adding to the feature set you should visit, OpenAidDistro.org, which links to the project page and a demo site. If you want to connect with other people who are using OpenAid, take a look at the new OpenAid group on Groups.Drupal.Org: http://groups.drupal.org/openaid.