Issue 28 March 29, 2012

As most of you know last week was DrupalCon Denver and boy was it a blast. This was the biggest DrupalCon yet with 3,100 in attendance and 103 sessions, 14 pre-conference trainings, and over 150 BOF's. I would some up the top topics as Mobile, Responsive Design, Symfony, and SASS! Over the next couple issues I will be including links to some of the best sessions. This week we will focus on the front end and mobile sessions.

Headlines

DrupalCon Munich Is Around the Corner: Call for Papers and Registration Open

Don't miss it this summer in Munich, Germany August 20 - 24.

DrupalCon São Paulo 2012

December 6-8, 2012 in São Paulo, Brazil

DrupalCon Portland 2013

Portland, Oregon, May 20-24, 2013! Really happy the next North American DrupalCon is going to be in Portland. Hope to see you all there.

Announcements

Google Summer of Code is Back for 2012

Google Summer of Code is a great project that you should check out. We've seen some cool things things and people out of it in the past.

Pantheon Drupal 8 Development (for free)

Scholarships Now Available for DrupalCon Munich

Events

Frontend United

Join designers, developers & drupalistas for three days of focused workshops, talks & sessions on design, frontend engineering & Drupal at the cool Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. April 20th - 22nd, 2012 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

DrupalCon Denver Recap

Keynote - Dries Buytaert

Dries delivered his usual State of Drupal talk giving attendees the lowdown on where Drupal has been and where it's going. Highlights includes some big stats like 1.5 Million Drupal sites on the web and by 2015 mobile traffic will increase by 25 times what it is today. He also laid out the Drupal roadmap which we've discussed here before. Drupal 8 feature freeze begins on December 1, 2012 followed by Code Freeze on February 1, 2013 culminating in a Drupal 8 release in August of 2013. You can grab the slides and watch the videos on buytaert.net.

Keynote - Mitchell Baker

Mitchell Baker of the Mozilla Project shared some interesting things that Mozilla is doing in the mobile space.

Keynote - Luke Wroblewski

Luke Wroblewski was my favorite speaker by far. Not only is the guy smart and funny but he backs up his points with data. Luke drove home the point that not only should be be thinking about mobile, but that we should be flipping our thinking around to approach the mobile vistors to our sites first. Take some time to watch his keynote or get his book "Mobile First", both are great.

Creating Responsive and Mobile-First Drupal Themes

Jake Strawn (himerus) of Omega Theme fame discusses responsive and mobile first in practice.

Using Sass & Compass in Drupal Theming

Nathan Smith of 960.gs and Matt Farina tag teamed on this session covering the Sass and Compass tools for working with CSS. CSS pre-processors are here to stay and these guys did a great job of coving the topic for beginners to experts. There is something for everyone in this session.

Front End Performance Improvements

Matt Farina (mfer) knows front end performance and his session was one of the best I attended. This quote sums up why we should care "According to a study done by Strangeloop, 97% of the time it takes to render a page happens in the front end for mobile devices". Matt explained how we can forget about front end performance and only focus on the server when we can get way more bang for our buck by optimizing the front end. Really good stuff to know.

HTML 4 S - While We're Waiting for the Revolution

No DrupalCon is complete without a Mortendk session. Morten does not disappoint. Don't let the title fool you. This is an HTML 5 talk complete with HTML 5 gang sign.

Watch DrupalCon Denver Sessions on Blip

If you want to check out all the session videos from DrupalCon Denver you can do so on the Blip.tv page.

Drupal Core

Streamlining Drupal Core Decision-Making

Dries has outlined a new workflow that he hopes will help the community make more timely progress towards a Drupal 8 release.

WSCCI Routing in Denver

Larry Garfield gives an update on WSCCI (Web Services and Context Core Initiative).

Development

Manage Ctools Exportables with Drush?

Kristof De Jaeger (swentel) over at realize.be announces some cool new features coming to the Ctools module. Exporting, Reverting, Disabling and Enabling any exportable with ctools and drush sounds pretty awesome. Check out the post and the screencast.

Theming & Design

Responsive Web Design: Missing the Point

Since Responsive Web Design was a hot topic at DrupalCon I thought I would include this great post by Brad Frost. There is a lot of hype about the term and Brad does a great job of bringing it back into focus.

Style Tiles

Styletil.es is outside of the scope of Drupal, but I did hear it mentioned in a presentation. Samantha Warren, Design Director for Phase2 has developed a great method for communicating a design direction to clients early in the process. It's a combination of mood boards and comps. If you are a designer or work with designers you check this out and tell your friends about Style Tiles.

Making Drupal Themer’s Life Easier: Autosaving CSS Changes From The Chrome Browser

Tim of timonweb.com shares some cool tips and tools for you CSS heads out there. Using the Chrome dev tools is great but wouldn't it be nice if you could save your CSS and JS right in the browser? Yeah. That would be sweet.

Modules

Introducing the Speedy Module

Speedy module developed by Matt Farina swaps the un-minified Javascript files Drupal delivers with minified files.

Drupal Optimizely Module for Easy A/B Testing

This is a really simple module that makes it easy to use the Optimizely.com service.

Module Monday: Improved Multi Select

Jeff Eaton delivers a good summary of this module that helps with those hard to use multi-select form fields.

Podcasts

DrupalEasy at DrupalCon Denver with MortenDK and DamienMcKenna

Ryan Price of DrupalEasy interviews several members of the Drupal community.

Finally

I Can Be Your Module & The Drupal Song Live!

Brian Lewis of Modules Unraveled apparently never goes anywhere without recording equipment. He captured this great moment during the Drupal Trivial Night at DrupalCon Denver.