Theme development

Hi all,

While my main development machine at work is a Desktop running Ubuntu,
I also have a macbook at home.

Up to now, I've been doing development at home using VirtualBox with a Ubuntu guest OS.
It works pretty well, but at times a little cumbersome - having to boot up twice, the Ubuntu OS isn't as smooth as Mac OSX etc.
But it means my environment is pretty much exactly the same, and almost exactly the same as the VPS I use for a few sites.

I'm just curious what others are up to, and especially how they test in multiple browsers.

Regards
Alan

Over at AdaptiveThemes we've been hammering out how to give our designers better tools for designing for Drupal. At first we thought about a set of briefs, then that grew into packages (brief + stock images, logo etc) and then I struck on the idea of Design Profiles.

A Design Profile is a package including a sample site (say a blog, business site, Ubercart site etc), PSD templates, a detailed brief and stock images (sample logo, photos etc).

If you are a website designer, you probably know that having a clear and well prepared style guide can save an enormous amount of time for developer and save the designer from having to explain the design details over and over. That’s why I have created a blank website style guide template. I hope it will enable designers to speed up their design process and bring more beautiful designs to our community.

read more: http://mogdesign.eu/blog/free-website-style-guide-photoshop-template-my-...

I just submitted a session proposal for 'Drupal for Education' session for Drupalcon Paris: http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/session/drupal-education. Any suggestions on what should be included are welcome.

At the moment Robert Castelo and I will be putting it together. Anybody interested in collaborating please get in touch.

This week I re-launched AdaptiveThemes as the first site to crowd source commercial Drupal themes. Sounds like a radical idea and it probably is. I seen crowdsourcing work for a number of other high profile design projects and I believe these crowd sourced themes can be a huge win for Drupal users and the Drupal designer and themer communities.

The concept is strait forward:

1. Designers upload designs
2. Themers convert the designs into beautiful Drupal themes
3. We sell them and split the profits 50/50, designer gets half, themer gets half

I attended Open Web Vancouver session on Thursday, June 11, 2009 with Angie Byron. We were talking about the lack of good looking themes for Drupal. So Angie encouraged designers to create and submit themes to Drupal.org.

I asked about a checklist or guidelines to developing custom themes for Drupal. How do you know when your theme is complete? Some themes on Drupal.org say RC1, alpha, beta, dev. What do these versions mean if anything?

We've been working on a new app and just opened up the process to beta testers. It's a real-time web presentation tool - allows a presenter to control display of images via URL. Really simple. Really effective.

And it's built with drupal.

The third article in my Drupal series for Adobe.com is out now. This article covers Drupal Zen Sub-Themes, including Dreamweaver tip(s) when working with Drupal themes.

"When asked why I would recommend the Zen theme versus a core theme such as Garland, I answer, Zen was built to be a seed for your tree—you plant the seed, water it, and watch it grow! Garland looks nice, but is not documented well and has custom page template code that should not appear elsewhere. In short, Garland is just not right as the basis for a theme; the Zen theme is."

Read the article now at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_zen_subthemes.html

The second article in my Drupal series for Adobe.com is out now. This article covers Drupal Themes, Dreamweaver tip(s) when working with Drupal, and shows off the Drupal Theme Starter desktop software.

"Understand the fundamentals of a Drupal theme and how Dreamweaver CS4 helps designers produce these themes."

Read the article now at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_themes_with_dwcs...

<a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_themes_with_dwcs4.html

As you might have noticed, there's a new 2.x-dev branch out of Acquia Marina that includes layouts and styles for Panels 3 among other things: http://drupal.org/node/472094

We'd particularly love to hear from anyone who has tried out this new feature.

For those in the Bay Area who are interested in this topic, we'll be discussing Panels 3 theming at BADCamp this Saturday afternoon: http://badcamp.net/session/theming-panels-3

This isn't strictly speaking about a theme, but it is about CSS code in my module that may be broken by conflicting layout in custom themes.

In DHTML Menu, I am developing a new feature that will make bullet icons clickable by positioning an invisible anchor element over the list icon. It's important to get the position exactly right no matter how the list is styled by the theme, so I'll need some help testing the CSS with different themes (or some advice from a CSS expert on potential problems).

For over a year LA Drupal has been recording our meetings and many of our events. View the videos online... http://ladrupal.blip.tv

Subscribe to our video podcast... http://ladrupal.blip.tv/rss (available directly on iTunes too)

We provide these videos for free for people to learn Drupal of course. Over the next handful of weeks you will see us release videos from our meetings and DrupalCampLA '08. Learn the basics of Drupal, theme design, module development, advanced views, Services module (Flash + Drupal), and many, many more topics all relating to Drupal.

Follow us on twitter... https://twitter.com/ladrupal

I have a current upgrade to Advanced Forums that has optimized images in it, the ticket is http://drupal.org/node/436084 However I post this here because there seems to be very little resources for people who need and/or optimize images for Drupal Themes and Modules. Last I knew Panels 3 needed some icons for various functions, and the developer (like me) is not a person to develop images.

Maybe Im missing a resource, or maybe this group should deal with such topics!

The sprint will be held at One Shoe http://www.oneshoe.nl/ in downtown utrecht which is one of the largest Drupal developing companies in holland. We have space for 20+ people in their nice and spacious office. Utrecht has lots of opportunities to go out in the evening, and with the Drupal Jam on Friday, this is bound to rock for all attendants.

Starting time will be at 10:00 in the morning on both days.

All people that care for UX are welcome. We can use: Graphic Designers, Coders, Copy Writers, Themers and CSS Ninjas

Confirmed Participants so far:

I take pride to post my first discussion. I am new to drupal.

My concern as mentioned by the title of this discussion is such that if there exists any forum where you can get feedback for your theme work, regarding its quality and best practices followed etc.

If there is none then can we group together to make such a forum etc.

Please give feedback about this idea. I am very anxious to hear from others. Thanks.

Regards,
Asif

I'm interested in making Acquia Marina theme recolorable. Please follow the link and discuss there. I'd like to collect resources to collaborate on this.

[This is a wiki - please don't hesitate to update, revise, and contribute your ideas!]

Overview: focus on the site builders, themers and those interested in delivering a killer user experience both for Drupal itself and for their own sites.

Goals

• Attract more designers to Drupal
• Improve Drupal’s visual design

Hi guys,

Just read the Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to... Hell? article over at Smashing Magazine. Excellent read for anyone who want to understand how to both mess it up and how to properly implement a semantic layout.