Design

How do you react when your pet project is criticized? How about when a project you use and love is criticized? When it's the same criticism you've heard over and over you and are tired of hearing it? That's happened yesterday to the Drupal Views project when a tweet sent out of frustration turned into a swarm of tweets, IRC conversations, and back room talk.

Every so often someone points to the markup generated by the Drupal Views modules and calls it ugly. This seems come up every so often in the forums, issue queues, blog posts, and on twitter. Most of the time this is where the conversation turns a bit ugly. Since this conversation has been had many times the people who are involved are a bit tired of explaining what's going on to someone new and to many Views is their baby and it was just called ugly. So, let me take a shot at explaining why Views markup is the way it is, why that's good for some, and what you can do about it if you don't like it.

The Deal With Views Markup

The markup from Views has to be very flexible out of the box. It's going to be used by a lot of people to do a lot of different things. So, the markup provides spans, divs, and classes for almost every case you'd want to style. If you are someone who lives in CSS and loves classes and separation of everything it's there for you. There is a certain group of designers that want this and they have been vocal and are, for the most part, happy with the markup.

Can't Make Everyone Happy

As the saying goes, you can't make everyone happy all the time. Having lots of spans, divs, classes and other forms of markup is directly opposed to small concise markup others love. You can't have both out of the box and what Views picked is actually easier for new people to pick up.

In Drupal to alter the output you need to know how the theming system works and how to override the default markup. Since Views provides lots of markup many people can learn to style the output without needing to know how to alter the markup output of views. It saves them from a layer of complexity.

Having Markup Your Way

If you are a markup purist and want to change the markup output by Views it's there for you to change. Views uses the templating system provided by Drupal and has a display plugin system of it's own. With the templating system you can override all of the markup provided by Views and replace it with your own. It's almost as simple as copying the Views template files into your theme and altering or replacing them.

The Drupal Design Camp in Boston this past weekend was fantastic. Having the event at the MIT Stata Center, a building that looks like it's right our of a Dr. Seuss book, was a perfect place for a design event. With well over 150 people, loads of fantastic sessions, and ideas for improving the tools and community designers and themers have the camp was a roaring success.

Photo by Jeff Eaton. Everyone is pointing at Morten.

Most of the shared Drupal themes aren't very good and there aren't very many commercial ones. That's what a study shared by Jay Batson pointed out. Jay went on to propose some steps we could take to court better design in the Drupal community. While he made some important points, there is one important point that was overlooked. The issue of crediting designers for their work.

Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have suggest drupal provide inline editing in the interface. This is a fantastic idea and one I would love to see in drupal. But, (I hate this part) inline editing in drupal is a difficult feature to add. So, before everyone wonders whey we don't offer it or why it's going to take some work let's look at why this is hard.

A new movement surfaced at drupalcon DC. It had been bubbling under the surface for some time and it came to a head when 1400 drupalers came together for a week. That movement is Design for Drupal or d4d.

Have you ever wondered where all the drupal designers are? It's easy to find a drupal coder. Drupal is full of coders doing some great things. But, designers are a lot harder to find and are a much rarer species. I would go so far as to call them an endangered species. So, what can we do get them off the endangered species list?

At Drupalcon DC we held a Birds of a Feather session to ask just this question. Just about everyone in the room was a designer. Below is most of the audio... but, be warned that is was recorded on the fly and my battery went dead with about a minute of conversation left.

Click To Play

This leaves me wondering where the designers go next? A first step is that there will be a room for them all day on Friday (Rm. 156) and Saturday at Drupalcon DC. Beyond that I hope those in the rooms can get a bright future started.

Last week, Bob and I launched a new look Geeks and God podcast and community site. When we had first launched the site two years ago, under drupal 4.7, it was a basic site where page nodes were our podcast and we used an outside software like feeder and feedburner to generate our feeds. Since then a community has grown around the podcast, the technology has come a long way, and the dynamic around the site has changed. To embrace this we rebuilt the site, added new features, and re-constructed our data model (we have a data model for the first time).

In Episode 102 of the podcast we walk through many of the technical changes, the modules we used, how and why we built what we built and more.

Drupal is a great development environment. And, when it comes to creating themes, you don't have to be a php whiz to create them either. There are even efforts to make theming easier with each new release. So, why aren't designers coming to drupal in hordes? Better yet, how do we make drupal more designer friendly?

Answersingenesis.org just released a new, cutting edge, web 2.0 look.