Episode Number:
227
The Drupal 8 Quicklink module enabled faster subsequent page loads on your Drupal site. It does this by prefetching links during idle time. This means as you browse your Drupal site, this module will be pulling down the html for any links that are in the current view port. This makes the next page load much faster. The module adds additional features and configuration options so you can fine tune the experience to fit your Drupal 8 site.
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Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2zBDGVE
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I’ll admit to having watched a few episodes of Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix. She has definitely inspired some of the downsizing my wife and I done over the last few years. I even applied her thought process to my personal website. When I moved it to a new host I thought about how much of the content on it was not sparking joy. If I didn't really care about stuff did my readers? This thought process is probably even more valuable for a large business-focused Drupal site than it was for my goofy personal website.
Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2PqV1LX In this 5-part series, take a deep dive into universal design concepts in the context of creating component-based systems for dynamic web content. Get a birds-eye view of the inner workings of user experience (UX) architecture. Brand strategy, user psychology, objective methodology, and data-driven decisions come together, guided by timeless fundamental ideas, to construct today’s digital journeys. Flexible Typography The Art of Setting Type for Dynamic Systems
In the 1950s, Swiss typographer and graphic designer Emil Ruder was involved in developing the International Typographic Style. Cleanliness, objectivity, and the use of “the grid” are key features of this approach which still plays a major role in design today. In 2006, Oliver Reichenstein said,
And while faster connection speeds have allowed us to provide more media-rich experiences, text-based information is still vital - and the only thing that devices like Google, Alexa, and assistive technologies for the differently-enabled “see.” Today, the timeless challenge of how to visually present text-based information is as formidable as it’s ever been. Contemporary design decisions take into account the experiences of billions of potential users, located anywhere in the world, in front of screens of all sizes, with a wide range of backgrounds, situations, and abilities. Fortunately, standards such as those for Heuristic Evaluation, the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and user testing tools such as the System Usability Scale and the Single Ease Question have provided an objective structure to inform the creative works of designers today. Fast, Scalable, Legible Type StylingGuiding principles for font selection and implementationLimit the number of fontsIn the name of consistency, efficiency, and optimized load times, consider combining two harmonious fonts that create a visual hierarchy. Two is considered an ideal number for fonts. Choose a font with enough members in its family to allow design options, however. A font with light and black versions, as seen on some of Google’s best fonts, will provide a versatile UI toolkit. Most brand standards contain definitions for print and well as web fonts. In the absence of such standards, a review of mission and vision statements can guide you to a font that reflects the brand identity. Use a responsive type scaleResponsive modular typography scales, when designed and implemented, are an easy way to preserve visual hierarchy across the various screen widths of devices. A modular type scale is a series of type sizes that relate to each other because they increase by the same ratio. Example of how responsive typography looks across various breakpoints on Mediacurrent’s Rain demo site.
Avoid All Caps for headings and paragraph textNot only have studies shown text formatted in All Caps decreases reading speed by 10-20%, but this styling presents substantial barriers for users with dyslexia. According to the latest estimates, that is 15-20% of the population. When headings are less than around 25 characters, all caps is still considered readable for everyone. All caps can also be a valid choice for short navigation titles and concise button copy. Avoid Italics for headings and paragraph textA first-time user may spend seconds on your website, not minutes, and as reading speed is dependant on legibility, styling is of paramount importance for all users. In terms of accessibility, italicized letters are nearly illegible to some with reading issues. Addressing accessibility concerns is a great investment that provides an opportunity to bring in objective best practices to increase usability, readability, and visual impact for all users, opening up your website to a larger audience. Modern, Readable, Accessible Type StylingGuiding principles for line and paragraph spacingLook to the gold standard for accessibilityBecause Section 508 compliance is currently attuned to the A and AA Level WCAG 2.0 guidelines, the AAA Guidelines are sometimes left out of the conversation. The guidelines around line and paragraph spacing, however, are especially easy to incorporate. Because they improve the experience for all users, they are well worth considering. Avoid justified textPeople with certain cognitive disabilities have problems reading text that is both left and right justified. The uneven spacing between words in fully justified text can cause "rivers of white" space to run down the page making reading difficult and in some cases impossible. Text justification can also cause words to be spaced closely together so that it is difficult for them to locate word boundaries. Implement a maximum width for containers of heading and paragraph textFor people with some reading or vision disabilities, long lines of text can become a significant barrier. They have trouble keeping their place and following the flow of text. Having a narrow block of text makes it easier for them to continue on to the next line in a block. Text blocks must be no wider than 80 characters. When determining how to limit the width of a responsive text block, it can be helpful to use a character counting tool. Or try advanced math! The Golden Ratio Typography Calculator generates suggestions for your entire type hierarchy based on the Golden Ratio: a pattern found in nature that is inherently pleasing to the human eye. Provide ample line spacing for paragraph textPeople with some cognitive disabilities find it difficult to track text where the lines are close together. Providing extra space between lines and paragraphs allows them to better track the next line and to recognize when they have reached the end of a paragraph. Provide line spacing that is at least 1.5 (a space and a half) in text blocks and spaces between paragraphs are at least 1.5x line spacing. In the first post of this series, we discussed the advantages of generously-sized type comfortably line-spaced within a width-restricted column. Not only does this approach align with that of today’s best-in-class websites and provide a comfortable, welcoming reading experience, it is universal design that is accessible and all-inclusive. Preparing to Reach a Global AudienceScratching the surface of localizationDesigning type for Right To Left (RTL) languagesArabic is the 4th most popular language globally and 60% of Arabic speakers prefer browsing internet content in Arabic. Aligning text to the right side is key, and so is upsizing the font to preserve text readability. Factoring in the shorter length of words as most Arabic words. Read more about web design for RTL languages. Example of RTL language typography on dubai.ae. Accommodating translated textCharacter counts expand or contract according to language. Expect a 15 - 30% expansion when translating English to Spanish or Portuguese, for example. When planning to translate English to Chinese or Japanese, however, expect variation. Read more about typography for translated text here. Planning for character-based languagesWritten Japanese, for example, consists of thousands of characters across four character sets: hiragana, katakana, kanji and the Latin alphabet. Japanese users perceive carelessly designed websites as reflective of brand quality. They describe products as “unnatural”, “foreign”, and “suspicious.” The work to get from unnatural to perfect is not hard. Read more about standards for presenting Japanese text on the screen. Applying and Iterating Type SystemsContinuous improvement based on user feedbackAfter carefully selecting type styles representative of the brand experience, applying them with accessibility in mind, defining parameters within responsive components, and perhaps including specifications for translated type, what comes next? We take these specs and build a living style guide to catalog the site’s elements and components. Having the building blocks all in one place not only ensures consistency but allows developers to rapidly adjust or efficiently leverage the existing pieces to create more complex components. A living style guide makes it easier to add new patterns to meet your needs and the needs of your users that arise as “the rubber hits the road” when content editors begin using the site and feedback is collected from users, ideally through methodical tests. Technology has evolved rapidly since pioneers like Emil Ruder developed the Swiss style, and is always offering new challenges for designers. But happily, this evolution has allowed us to collect data to objectively guide our practice and to create, share, and continuously improve standards for accessibility and usability, allowing us to meet the challenge of designing with confidence for the global audience. What a great time to be a designer! In the next installment, we’ll cover pattern libraries/ living style guides in greater detail. We’ll discuss how style libraries ensure a consistent experience and make ongoing enhancements much easier. Learn about the steps it takes to build an emotion-rich, brand-true user journey within the restricted structure of a website built to last for years displaying dynamic, user-entered content. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2ZAAIzu For over a decade* the Drupal community has gathered in volunteer-led “camps”, based on the BarCamp model, to follow in that camp’s initial goals:
The scope of Drupal Camps has expanded as our community has grown and matured, and camps now serve everyone in the community, not just developers. They serve as an on-ramp for new developers, a networking opportunity for clients and agencies, a marketing opportunity for service providers, and much more. The Drupal Event Organizers have documentation of over 50 volunteer-led events with over 10,000 attendees worldwide in the past year, and we know there are almost double this number that we don’t have good data for. These events have evolved organically, with little central organization, and are estimated to comprise more than one million dollars in sponsorship and ticket sales worldwide, yearly. The Event Organizers have organized in various forms over that time… from various documentation efforts to our current monthly meeting format. With Kaleem’s instigation, the group started toward a more formal organization in late 2018, and that process is almost a reality. We’ve established a formation board composed of organizers from across the globe and have been collaborating on a charter for the Event Organizers Working Group over the past few months. We’re looking forward to presenting it soon and beginning the next chapter of the Drupal Event Organizers. Thanks to the following folks who have contributed to the effort thus far. Our Formation Board members:
And our trusted advisers:
* Possibly starting at Drupal Camp Toronto, 2006? If you know of an earlier camp, please let us know in the comments. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2zBv6Gg Having more companies working with Drupal is a good and necessary thing, but it means we need to improve the way that we onboard, recognize, and differentiate those who help sustain and innovate Drupal. A few weeks ago, I earned my first ever Drupal contribution credit for my DrupalCamp Colorado keynote. While I am oddly excited about that, I also find it somewhat ironic, as that keynote should not be mistaken for my first contribution to Drupal. According to my Drupal.org profile, I’ve been a community member for over twelve years. In that time, I’ve presented keynotes for three other DrupalCamps, presented sessions and participated in panels going back to DrupalCon Boston 2008, led the RFP process for the redesign of Drupal.org, chaired DrupalCon Chicago 2011, served on the board of the Drupal Association for nine years and, most recently, served on the Executive Director Search committee. That is but a partial tally of my individual contributions; of course my company, Palantir.net, has also made considerable contributions of time, talent, and treasure over all these years. Recognition is not my motivation for these efforts; like so many open source contributors, I give back to Drupal because I am committed to stepping up when I see a need or an opportunity. When I was new to the community, the karma earned from such efforts, code and non-code, was informally held in the living memory of those who were there. I always felt that I had earned the credibility and support of those with whom I collaborated closely to move on to the next opportunity, to tackle and solve the next problem. In many ways, as a woman on/of the internet, I appreciated the relative anonymity of it. In that way, Drupal has become the largest independent community-driven open source project. And many of us believed that our collective success and the impact we made was enough to sustain the virtuous cycle of open source. But was it? Open source has won: we now have legions of people and companies who rely on Drupal and other open source tools and products; however, these companies picked the best tool, which just happened to be an open source tool, and they don’t necessarily yet know the open source way. Twelve years ago, the Drupal community was small enough that those established norms and expectations were passed on person-to-person, along with the lore and the legends. The old ways of influencing behavior and enforcing norms through social bonds (aka peer pressure) aren’t strong or explicit enough for the swells of newcomers. There is a lack of shared understanding, visibility and support for what it takes to not just keep Drupal sustainable, but to have it thrive and win in a competitive landscape. This lack of clarity has led to the emergence of multiple subcultures within the commercial ecosystem and a worrying disparity between those who benefit the most from Drupal versus those who give the most. In his Amsterdam 2014 keynote, Dries noted that while open source has a long history of credit (for code) to the individual contributors, this does not adequately recognize (or incentive) the organizations. He proposed a simple way to give organizations credit in addition to individual credits for the core issues their teams either performed directly or sponsored, which the Drupal Association released in late 2015. Over time, this system has been expanded to capture more than just code contributions. And yet, the contribution credit system has not wholly replaced karma. As my own experience shows, so much of the vital work that Drupal relies on is not yet captured in credits. Due to my privilege (not looking for a job, having well-established connections in the community, etc.), the lack of visibility was a feature, not a bug, for me as an individual contributor. However, wearing my Palantir CEO hat I’ve come to realize that the failure to capture fully what and how companies do (and are expected) to contribute is far more problematic for the sustainability of the project. Some of the most essential work in the community (Drupal Association Board of Directors, the Community Working Group (CWG), the Security Team and non-code Core team work including release management, communication, sprint organizing and overall project and initiative coordination) is severely undervalued or all-in-all ignored by the contribution system. George DeMet's ongoing commitments as the chair of the CWG often average anywhere from ¼ - ½ of his time (more at intense times) and over the last year he received four credits (the other members of the CWG received even less!). The community and the project suffer because this invisibility obscures, and indeed over time deteriorates, the community expectations and norms by measuring what is easy, rather than what matters. When Drupal 7 was released, the firms that built Drupal enjoyed a competitive advantage: those who wanted to use Drupal knew which firms meaningfully contributed and why it mattered. However, over the last five years, the Drupal ecosystem has expanded to include many new, larger firms that leveraged partnership and sponsorship programs to establish their Drupal credentials. These programs and the new implementers and agencies they ushered into the Drupal community are essential to Drupal’s growth and adoption. They are a welcome addition to the ecosystem. However, there are serious problems with the ways that these programs have been structured to date and their unintended impact on our culture of contribution:
Allowing companies to position themselves as leading experts in Drupal without validation that these firms are contributing commensurate with the benefits derived from Drupal has been corrosive to the sustainability of the project. This has tacitly supported the commoditization of Drupal services, devalued the competitive advantage received from direct contribution, and simultaneously incentivized and conditioned all in the ecosystem to increase indirect contribution (sponsorship and advertising on Drupal.org and events including DrupalCon). As I noted on a panel at OSCON, I see all of this as a success problem. Having more companies, including large scale implementers and agencies, working with Drupal is a good and necessary thing. What we need to improve is the way that we onboard, recognize, and differentiate those who help sustain and innovate Drupal to (re)establish a culture of contribution for Drupal. Doing this well will involve creating new and easy-to-access avenues for contribution that match the project’s weighted needs and companies’ available resources (be they time, talent or treasure). A concerted focus on what matters will shore up Drupal’s path to long-term sustainability. Community Drupal Open Source PeopleOriginally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2LiUDcT
Episode Number:
226
In the last episode we covered creating a Drupal 8 module with Drupal Console. In the episode before that, we covered using the Drupal 8 ECK module to create custom entities. In this episode, we cover how you can use Drupal Console to scaffold out custom entities on your Drupal 8 website.
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Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2HzMX53
Masonry is a very popular JavaScript library, that stacks items in columns and rows, like a masonry brick wall. The items reorder themselves according to their size as the viewport size changes with a nice animation effect. For some examples, take a look at the official Masonry site. It is possible to create a view in Drupal with this style of layout. Keep reading to learn how! Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2zxj1Cc |
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