First session, OSCMS Summit

Yeargh!

I $%^& hate losing posts because of some stupid system bug. Which, of course, just happened. Unbelievably anNOYing. Argh. Of course, it was a brilliant post, too. the contents of which I've nominally forgotten.

Attended the first drupal session, which was originally "Theming system enhancements," but rapidly became, in the spirit of BarCamp, a self-directed discussion of theming goals as defined by the community. Adrian did his best to show us his goal for the theming system (being one of the lead developers on the Forms API, as well as the theming system). Many of the changes were exciting, some less so.

The best contribution to the discussion was made by Matt, when he mentioned that Wordpress was going through similar theming growing pains recently. He said the best decision they made was to identify their audience (those who know nothing and have no desire to learn anyhing (referring to HTML), those who know HTML and CSS, and those who know PHP), then design their themes and theming system for the desired user (the middle group, the HTML/CSS folks). Designing a system for one type of user is way easier than designing for all users. By a lot. Matt channeled Jason of 37signals and said, "Simplify your requirements."

They (Wordpress) tried the CSS Zen Garden approach, having only specific CSS classes that need to be overwritten, but everyone hated it (mostly because the content in a real site isn't well defined - CSS Zen Garden works because you can design to the pixel since the content is fixed, not so in a real life). So now they have theming functions, too.

I had more session insights, but they were on the last post. Which was eaten by the electron ether.

The next session is Actions and Workflow by John Van Dyk and the Bot in Lullabot. The idea here is to add a workflow engine into the drupal system, allowing complete configuration of process flow in creating, publishing, modifying, and approving content. Mike isn't convinced of the need, or the UI, given his experiences with simple state engines of "only" six states (which would have made John's proposed UI so complicated any user's eyes would cross upon loading the page). I'm not unconvinced, in that the proposed changes make actions role based (an author can write an article, and an editor can publish it, which would work very well for the UPA).

We'll see. He seemed interested about halfway through the session.

I'm having problems sitting for any length of time, my left leg being much worse than the right leg. Between the cut on my hand from a branch and the back of my knees, I'm being extra careful to wash my hands a lot.