Style Guide Driven Development

In this talk I'll demonstrate a technique called style guide driven development, which allows front end developers to create plain HTML "styleguides" without ever knowing or caring how the Drupal backend works.

I'll argue that back end Drupal developers need to start empowering front end developers, and layout a plan for doing so. I'll show how this new workflow allows front end developers to work freely, by generating clean, custom HTML from scratch, without having to learn the Drupal API. Finally, I'll show one real-world example of a site I built in this manner, for which almost all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript was written by non-Drupalists before the Drupal backend was even started.

GUI development tools like Views, Panels, and Display Suite create a very hard coupling between the front end and the back end that makes it impossible for non-Drupal front end developers to work effectively.

The world of front-end web development has undergone a huge renaissance in the past 3 years. Modern front end developers are widely adopting new layers of abstraction for familiar technologies (SASS, LESS, CoffeeScript) and new automation strategies (Grunt, Bower, Yeoman, CasperJS, QUnit). With tools like Backbone.js, Angular.js, and Meteor.js front end developers are now writing complex application logic. Increasingly, front end developers are demanding new freedoms to use their new skills and tools.

We in the Drupal community are missing out on a huge, exciting, new talent pool. Developers with a non-Drupal front end background are united in their bewilderment by the Drupal theming layer, and they are increasingly steering clear of Drupal all together as a result.

In this talk, I want to argue that it's us, not them, who needs to change.

This talk is geared towards all skill levels.  A passing familiarity with the Drupal theme layer will be helpul, but not required.