Drupalcon London (revisited) Entities & Omega

I mentioned these two Drupalcon 2011 sessions in summer posts and thought they are well worth  revisiting. The first concerns adaptive, responsive design and the Omega theme with Jake Strawn:

Omega keeps cropping up previous Drupalcons, in May at Drupalcamp in Leeds and Wednesday night at NWDUG in Manchester. What is Omega? Here is the intro to this (Drupal) project:

Omega - Responsive HTML5 Base Theme

The Omega Drupal 7 Base Theme is a highly configurable HTML5/960 grid base theme that is 100% configurable. Each zone (group of regions) can be configured for content first layouts (push/pull classes), hidden at any time and each region can be disabled, resized, and placed easily any way you see fit.

The theme appears fairly complex, but there is a lot of effort in developing the theme and tools to support it. Not unique to Omega but there's a way to have some pages with a different format according to context with alternate layout in terms of columns, zones, regions. ... The thought of working with columns seems constraining and yet reading and other sessions on the history of the printed page show how fundamental grids remain to design including the web.

A site that can respond and adapt the viewport to the device it is being viewed on is a must have. Central to design choices, there are fonts too. I notice this past week BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week has featured Just My Type by Simon Garfield and there are still a couple of days to listen to the episodes.

Another topic that keeps coming up is Entities, presented in August by Ronald Ashri:



The video and my notes from Drupalcon London remind me of being really switched on by this module, both in itself and with my requirements in mind.

In addition to the astronomical reference, Eric Evans's book Domain-Driven Design has an excellent figure that helps explain the scope and use of entities. I'll see if I can capture this at some point.