Drupal

DrupalCon is the twice-yearly international event that brings together the people who use, develop, design and support the Drupal platform.

It’s the Drupal platform that we, Access, use to develop and deliver the majority of our web projects and Content Management Systems. So, in August (is it that long ago?) we attended and chose to sponsor our first Drupalcon.

Drupalcon Croydon London!

Keynote, Sessions, BoFs and Beer

Drupalcon events typically kick off with an opening 'state of Drupal' keynote from Dries Buytaert, looking back on recent developments, outlining the challenges for the industry, but more importantly delivering the vision for future versions of Drupal. The days are then structured around other keynote speakers and ‘sessions’ – talks and discussion panels featuring Drupal experts and other industry visionaries from around the world. There’s something for everyone with topics themed around Code and Core Development, Design and UX (user experience), Business and Best Practices. For those looking to spend time on more specific topics or interests there’s the BoF (birds of a feather) meetings – breakouts of much smaller, ad-hoc groups collaborating to solve issues or share knowledge.

And of course, in between and after, there’s plenty of time to chat, network and drink a few beers. The event was very well run and the organisers and volunteers did an excellent job of making the DrupalCon London the biggest yet.

A Brief History of Web Design & Usability

In the early days of designing and building websites there were very few conventions to follow; everything was new, exciting and uncharted. Elements that we are now familiar with on the web, like search boxes, buttons, headings, navigation, layouts and logo positions were often interpreted & presented in a wide variety of new styles, some good, some not so good- standards had yet to be set. The web was a difficult place to find your way around; a dark room full of unknown signs, signals and doorways.

I’ve already written about our requirement for a web-based task management system for the digital department. Here you can download our Task Manager code that we ended up using so you can try it out for yourself!

Over the past 3 years, the Digital team at Access has grown dramatically in number and in work load.  With the steep increase in number and complexity of projects, our Monday morning work-in-progress notes were becoming unworkable. Within hours the sheets were out of date and scribbled on, things were getting forgotten about and there was far too much pinging of emails back and forth. It was becoming evident that we needed a better way of managing tasks within the department.