October 21 to 23, 2011

UC Berkeley, California

A culmination of the brightest Drupal minds in the technology hub of the world

1500
attending

The new Views user interface: How it works and how it was made

Recently, the Drupal 7 version of the Views module got an entirely new user interface, thanks to a months-long partnership between designers and engineers working for Drupal Gardens and major Views contributors from the rest of the Drupal community. Working together, we revamped almost every part of the interface, with the goal of exposing the most common functionality in easy-to-use "wizards" while still preserving the full power of the module for advanced users. The result is a totally new experience for site builders who are using Views to build sites in Drupal 7.

In this session, I will:

  • Go over the new Views interface and demonstrate how to use it, as well as give some background on the process by which it was made.
  • Discuss the interface from the perspective of new usability patterns introduced in Drupal 7 core (highlighting places where it follows those patterns and places where it creates new ones), which should be useful for anyone interested in making usability improvements to other Drupal 7 contributed modules.
  • Talk about lessons learned from the process of doing a design-driven overhaul of an extremely popular Drupal module.

This session will primarily focus on Views from the perspective of a site builder. Coding experience isn't necessary, though we may (briefly) discuss some of the high-level software architecture that underlies the new interface.

Speaker(s):