Update: The final proposed session is a bit more focused. This is why I pretend there's a method to my madness.

While brainstorming narratives for a presentation for drupalcon on "the practical drupal architect", I started scribling notes about "schools of thought" for drupal architecture.  Interested in whether this kind of high level stuff is even remotely interesting to anyone. An actual presentation will use real websites with labels and overlays and big arrows to illustrate these points of course.

Prototypical example of Classical Drupal Architecture: whitehouse.gov

The classical school is relatively conservative: you might use mini-panels to create clusters of blocks to ease the micromanagement of visibility settings, but not full on panels itself. The classical builder tends to pick modules which are the most tried and true solutions to the sites needs, and rarely uses radical new methods. For this reason, many people will call classical sites "standard implementations" - but the good builder knows there's nothing standard about knowing the right tool for the job.

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Hitler finds out that that Panels might not be ready for Drupal 7.0 at a recent Hitler's Drupal Users meetup.

Note this another Hitler downfall video, which i find to be hilarious

1, Issue for Ctools Update
2. (dependent on ctools update) Issue for panels.

Link to youtube.

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Please be seated for my sermon. There's an evil force out there, and its responsible for the majority of failed websites. This force seduces you into focusing too much on questions like:

"Is that the right shade of blue? Would a drop shadow make that element pop? Why do links have to look ugly, can't we tone them down so they bend in better with the design?"

The evil force wants you to focus on those dumb questions so that ignore the really important questions:

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If you are new to drupal, then this list is for you. These are some of the best of the best drupal modules. Everything from standard framework modules, to location and mapping is covered. Note that if you've been emersed in drupal for some time, than this will be "old news".

"The big three" are important enough that they deserve a category of their own. Most drupal modules worth using have integrated with one of these three. Their importance simply can't be stressed enough.

• Content Construction Kit (CCK) - Part of drupal 7; still a contrib in drupal 6. Allows you to define new content types (e.g. blog entry, event, or employee record...) and add "fields" to them. A field could be plain text, an image, a flash video, or whatever. You can also adjust how these fields display in the live view. No drupal install should be without this module.
• Views - Broadly speaking, this module empowers non programmers to build dynamic streams of content displaying any number of fields. The content may come from nodes (a.k.a. content types and fields), users, system log entries, etc. You can display this stream in any number of formats including RSS feeds, tables, or just the vanilla view for a content type. You can also create pages or blocks -- its very tightly interwoven with drupal. Nearly every drupal module worth using is integrated with this module. Extremely powerful when used in combination with CCK.
• Panels -
  
  I believe Panels + CCK & Views is a hint at what drupal will look like 3 years into the future. I had to change my pants after the first time I witnessed it. At a very simple level, you could think of it as a layout manager. Create a 1,2,3 column layout. Or a 3 column layout with a full width footer and header, and plop pieces of content in them -- say a view, a block, or a node. That description, however does not do it justice. Since version 3, its positioned itself as a replacement for drupal core's clunky block system. It can now override a node page, and can be used to place content all over the place. It also introduced a concept of contexts, selections rules, and relationships. These are concepts that deserve a series of blog posts, but lets just say its solving some of the weirdest, mind numbing, bug creating problems found in advanced websites. Ironically, I used to hate this module, but after version 3 I will defend its awesomeness to the death!

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Slides from a presentation I did today @ drupal camp austin. Will expand on Drupal.behaviors in a later post.

Note to self: pick an easier topic for next presentation