April 28th Conference Call Notes

Meeting introductions and site history

So very important to this initiative, our conference call started off today with Claudio pointing out that our vision is still very much alive and well. It's clear by the number of people still seeking to participate a couple of months after DrupalCon Boston that the Design For Drupal initiative, or D4D, as we seem to be calling it for short, is going to have legs over time.

Claudio took a few moments to mention a couple of website administrative notes from our server, such as the initial install having been Drupal 6 and our having needed to downgrade it to Drupal 5 so that we have better module support available to us for some of our more immediate needs. If you had created an account previously but have not logged in very recently, please try to login to the server. If the system can not locate your account based on your email, please go ahead and create another account on the server. The downgrade caused a few problems with the database and some accounts were lost in the process. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Next in the introductory part of the conversation, we all took a cursory glance over at the www.designfordrupal.org home page to get a taste of the direction the design for the site is heading.

Discussion of Site Sections

To make sure everyone is on the same page as far as what our major goals are for major sections of the site, Claudio quickly listed a number of the site sections we are planning on building. These include but are not limited to:

• Training Materials
• Library of Design Tools/Assets
• Knowledge base for Drupal themers and designers working with Drupal
• Job Postings
• Forums and Community
• A Mentoring program for new Drupal designers

To-Do and To-Consider Lists of Things..

Please make sure your full contact information is available on the website.

We need to begin focusing on using the D4D site to post meeting notes (such as this,) agendas for future meetings and calls, and all of that sort of thing. That having been said, the Designers and Information Architects group on http://groups.drupal.org should always be kept apprised of upcoming conference calls and plans, and the D&IA group will be a great way for us to draw in new talent to contribute to our project so that we can in turn contribute back into the Drupal community as a whole. That group is one of the primary, bi-directional access points to the rest of the Drupal world for us. Of course, the users in the support forums on http://drupal.org as well as IRC, and all other available resources should all be encouraged to participate.

We need to begin contributing content for the Design For Drupal Showcase section of this site.

As we utilize the different groups.drupal.org groups to post information and share, as well as on our on websites, et cetera, we need to be aware that we should try to not cross-post duplicated content, as our initiative will be of the most value if Google and the other search engines index and rank us well, and they all frown upon duplicate content - some minor changes usually help with that, and don't appear quite so spammy to humans, as well.

John mentioned the "oh, everyone knows that..." factor for creating educational content. He pointed out something that I've noticed time and time again - not everyone does know that and there is a great deal of content that we can be giving to fill in those gaps in users' knowledge bases and in particular for our core target audience - designers who are trying to learn to implement their beautiful designs into a system that has an admittedly high learning curve. They need a comfortable place to learn.

We discussed possibilities for what I imagined would essentially be educational style guides - examples from the O'Reilly or even Dummies books that use graphical convention for "gotcha" kinds of traps or little tricks and tips along the way. Further, it was said that we might could break down our lessons into "recipes," potentially with a multi-level approach. For example, we might have a simple recipe for getting one design goal accomplished simply and quickly, but upon clicking a certain link within the node, a much more detailed explanation for more advanced users would be revealed, or possibly linked to in an entirely different but related node. We said that one dividing line for what's the basic level versus intermediate might be no php code at all versus minor php code. Claudio's idea is that rather than having to search through lots and lots of links, possibly outdated information, et cetera, there would be a quick recipe for a solution, and users would be able to give it a vote of "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," as this is often much more useful information to people than one older forum topic that is "the" explanation of how something is supposed to be done.

On a similar "ratings" topic, it was mentioned that a module rating system (my understanding was not a hugely expansive module review section, but of the modules that would be of most use to designers) would be a nice feature on the site. I believe it was Kieran who pointed out one of the pitfalls of software voting/reviews, and that is that the developers have a nasty habit of gaming the system to up the scores of their own products and reduce those of their competitors. It was mentioned that this could be avoided by having a short list of trusted reviewers to produce this content.

The idea of an IRC bot (and its needing shell scripting access) was mentioned, pointing out that we should probably have our own IRC channel - #drupal-d4d on the Freenode network was proposed.

Towards the end of the conversation, someone pointed out that content generally equals people, not feature lists on sites. That having been pointed out, I think there was a general consensus to start taking action immediately on the most pressing issues, that being content creation, primarily. In this process we need to begin identifying topics that need to be decided upon, discuss them, get a consensus, and make some decisions as we go, but the sooner the better,) as these things become more difficult to change later.

For the purposes of having a need for multiple ftp accounts, having an email listserver, and possibly an IRC bot and other things, it was noted that Mosso.com does not allow shell access. To that end I made a note to talk to a friend that owns a hosting company. I spoke with him this evening and he's offered to do the hosting for the site for free in exchange for a footer link to his company as supporting our initiative and offering Drupal hosting services, if we decide to migrate to another host.

We discussed a need for an SVN or CVS server for those admins working on configuring modules and that sort of thing on the site. Version control would certainly help us to keep from breaking others' work.

Another SEO thought: we need to standardize on links to either http://designfordrupal.org or http://www.designfordrupal.org, as search engines regard those URLs as different host addresses. This will dilute the strength of our backlinks to the site and affect our search ranking. Whatever we decide upon, we can make an edit to the .htaccess file at the root of our server's public_html folder and have the address rewritten in the headers to this end.

Next Conference Call and Wrap-Up

The next conference call will be Monday, May 12th at 5pm Eastern. For that meeting we are going to try and have a www.freeconference.com account set up or some other solution so that there is less confusion at the start.

There were a few links mentioned during the call and I didn't know where to put them in this page so I am putting them here for your review...

• ProjectVerse http://projectverse.org
• Casetracker + OG Project Management: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1032
• GoogleGroups temporary list - http://groups.google.com/group/designfordrupal