Prototype based approach

Drupal has very unique requirements for the front-end developers to follow. They obviously need to know their own tools and techniques (SASS, CSS, grids, javascripts etc.) but also we usually expect them to know a lot of drupalisms like basic php knowledge, theme overrides, preprocess functions etc. This leads to pretty steap learning curve for front-end developers. Would it be great for them to master their own skills deeper instead of learning all backend drupalisms?

Another problem that we face in projects is that we can't give client full user experience till the nearly very end of the project. Specially it plays very bad role when we develop responsive websites as there are a lot of bugs arise when you let client to test the final website. Would it be great to let client (and of course QA team) to test the site before we are few weeks before launch?

In this session we are going to talk about prototype based approach in theming when website first is built as set of pages with fully working responsive behavior and javascripts. Then we make drupal to match html to be exact (or as close as possible) to prototypes. This approach make client much happier as they can start testing something real much earlier and provide feedback.

This technique eliminated a lot of stress in the end of the project we have built recently and made launch much more smooth.

We will cover drupal techniques how to implement custom HTML in drupal in smooth way and not to override too much of templates.

We will also talk about editors user experience -- how not let editors to go to drupal backend to perform daily work nearly at all.

Some of concepts are described already in our blog post http://wearepropeople.com/blog/prototypes-a-better-approach-to-development but we definitively have more to tell.