Square Grid responds for Drupal 7

Square Grid grid The lightweight Square Grid theme builds off of the powerful flexibility of The Square Grid framework by Avraham Cornfeld. See h
squaregrid config screen detail
squaregrid config screen detail You can turn the responsive support on and off.
squaregrid config screen detail If responsive support is enabled, you can choose what grid sizes to enable.
squaregrid config screen detail If you do not want responsive support, you can choose a universal grid size for all screens.
squaregrid config screen detail IE support options can be configured as well.

From the get-go, Square Grid has been intended to offer less. Sometimes less is more, especially so when it comes to front-end web development.

Square Grid is a Drupal 7 base theme* leveraging the design and implementation power of Square Grid, combined with principles of responsive design. It's been in active development, with new features and the odd bug fix pushed live periodically over the past several months. Here's where the theme stands now.

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Upgraded to Drupal 7: Salesforce, Homebox, Stock API, Hierarchical Select

Salesforce module and other modules Our view is that the best way to upgrade existing Drupal modules is to contribute the work back to their Drupal.org projects.

For us, every project starts with goals. From goals comes strategy, from strategy comes planning (information architecture, interaction design, technical architecture) and from planning comes (a rather agile) implementation.

And for implementation, 2011 so far is the year of Drupal 7 — at least it has been for us, because all of the projects we've started this year have implementation powered by Drupal 7 at the core. In some ways, we love Drupal 7 so much more than Drupal 6, we don't like to look back. It's almost painful to have to deal with Drupal 6 anymore … especially when it comes to theming.

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When will Drupal 8 be released?

Dries Buytaert April 2010 Prediction of Drupal Release; Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert March 2011 graphic Drupal code size; Dries Buytaert
PINGV Creative TBDR of core size versus release dates; Kate Lawrence
Dries Buytaert 30 contributors responsible for 50% of D7 Patches; Dries Buytaert

When will Drupal 8 be released?

When will Drupal 8 be out? It's a question that's asked in many forms.

Sometimes it's phrased as: when will I have to upgrade from Drupal 6? Or, how long will Drupal 7 be supported?

Laura Scott and I were reviewing Dries Buytaert's 2010 State of Drupal and the estimates on when the new Drupal release candidate would be virtually frozen. The graph below is his summary graph of the trends in April 2010.

Dries Buytaert
Fig 1 — Dries Buytaert's April 2010 Prediction of Drupal Release.

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Drupal Front-End Developer (Themer)

PINGV Creative is seeking an experienced and adept Drupal front-end developer to join our team. Work with our team on various projects, each presenting new and interesting challenges. We focus on strategy and design, with six years' experience and expertise in Drupal. Development is a follow-through of the plan we create with/for the client.

We are a virtual company.

Open Atrium and Iterations

all tickets of all iterations Using "projects" in Atrium, we can define iterations by close date, and assign tickets to iterations.
list of iterations You can view all of the iterations planned, and see their descriptions. Each iteration is clickable for detailed viewing.
single iteration view Single iterations of backlog items can be viewed as well, and this is stock functionality for Open Atrium.
iteration selection dropdown On any comment update, you can change the iteration assignment of a ticket
comment status change And all changes are tracked in the comment metadata displayed right there in the thread.

Too busy doing the doing to talk about the doing?

As a strategy and design studio, we're all over communications. It's an uninterrupted conversation with our clients, hashing out ideas, working iterations of goals definition, research, wireframes, designs. But when it comes to development, when we put our heads down and get to work, it's all too easy for us in our focused implementation state to just do it and not communicate enough about what we're doing. Of course, this can be disconcerting to the client who has no idea how things are going. And that's a ripe situation for fear, uncertainty and doubt to creep into the relationship, and suddenly a successful project-in-progress can feel troubled, even if it's not.

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The best user interface is the one you don't notice

woman with eyeglasses If you're focusing on your glasses, not the subject through the camera, your glasses are dirty.
The best design is the one you don't notice, you just use.
french horn The expert interface requires many many hours of practice. Do you want your website to be as difficult as playing French horn?
man climbing rock face Rock climbers climb because the interface is difficult.
astronaut spacewalking Astronauts train every day so that they focus not on their gear but on what they need to do.

We all want beautiful things. A beautiful graphic user interface is no exception. But how do you define beauty? Pretty colors? Balanced composition? Elegant typography? Appealing trimmings? Grid fidelity?

Without diminishing those things, my feeling is that, when it comes to GUIs, the most beautiful are the ones you don't notice. The beautiful GUI is so useful, so understandable, so usable that you don't even think about the inteface — you're totally absorbed in what you're doing via the interface. This is true for simple devices as well as for complex expert apps where, once you get familiar with the tools, you just use them without thinking.

Expert interfaces are for experts

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Lucidly Drupal: Setting up Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid LAMP stack for your Drupal site

Ubuntu Linux + Drupal Drupal requires some things, and likes some other things a lot. Here's how to configure the latest Ubuntu Linux to make Drupal h

We're frequently setting up servers for development, for staging, for production. I've lately preferred the Debian flavor of Linux, but up until now that had been something of a problem because Debian and Ubuntu did not include the higher-quality php5-gd library, which meant that you either had to compile your own PHP, pull from an alternative source host, or cope with substandard image resizing with limited processing features.

But now we have Ubuntu 10.4 LTS "Lucid" and life is good. Lucid comes with PHP 5.3.x and the proper GD2 library! (Cheers. Applause.)

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A New Year. A New Drupal. (A New Era.)

Drupal 7 Drupal 7
Drupal 7 Drupal 7 is a whole new Drupal
Drupal 7 Contributors 954 people contributed to Drupal 7 in tangible ways. Brian "brianv" Vuyk can be found a little above Druplicon's right eye.

2010 was an amazing year. But 2011 has come in with such a bang, it's impossible not to look forward.

Drupal 7 is out!

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PINGV Creative's DrupalCon Proposals

What's inside a template?
Laura Scott
Kate Lawrence

DrupalCon Chicago session proposal voting is open. This time around we've proposed a couple of sessions. If they sound interesting to you, please vote for them! To help ensure that DrupalCon is loaded with a nice variety of high quality presentations, the organizing team's curation process for the final slate of sessions is not solely based on the voting:

Once the voting closes the track chairs will use the voting results, limits on number of sessions a speaker can speak at, feedback from previous DrupalCons, input from the team for the track, their experience and expertise in the area to fill the available spots in their track.

…but the votes certainly help!

Client-provider success factors

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Resolving Door

The University of Colorado School of Journalism brings crowdsourced answers to students' pressing questions.

Unlike most websites, which conceptually are typically places for people to consume information, and perhaps share back thoughts or content for others to consume — "Websites are conversations" — the Resolving Door project embodied the user experience characteristics of a web application. That is, it's a website in that it has a URL and can be accessed in a browser, but its purpose is to be a tool to help the user do something rather specific.

In this case, the site's purpose is to provide the means for University of Colorado students to ask questions and post answers.

New home page The new site has streamlined navigation with a user-centric experience as its focus. Added colors add to differentiation of cont
Old Resolving Door home page Description.
Resolving Door at end of Phase 1 For Phase 1 of the project, we revamped the Information Architecture, redesigned the look and feel, and focused the User Experie
Solr search results We changed the Ask bar into a search for existing Questions. By using Apache Solr for search, we could get excellent results, as
Carousel detail The carousel is the most website-like feature. The rest of the functionality is more webapp-focused.
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