TNT Drupal themes: Why Drupal?

What's new?

Highlighting some Drupal site recipes

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My usual response to "Can Drupal do X?" is "Drupal can do anything!"  Usually the tougher question is figuring out just how to do X in the sea of configuration options and modules available. 

Drupal’s site itself has a site recipes section (read carefully, some can be a bit out of date), and there are other such tutorials out there on the web (just add in a keyword for the kind of site you’re trying to build). Below are a few links to Drupal Recipes for several common website styles.

Welcoming Jay to the TopNotchThemes team

We'd like to officially welcome a new member of our theming team, Jay Wolf!

Yes, we have stolen him away from his plans for world domination, and perhaps delayed his efforts toward contributing a theme starting with every letter of the alphabet to Drupal.org. Jay has recently joined our team as a full time themer and the fruits of his labour are just starting to show.

Jay is a long time member of the Drupal community, and you may remember him from such themes as Amadou (which I have often recommended to people as an awesome theme), Barron, Celju, and Golden Hour. He'll be assisting us in turning our designs into awesome, feature rich Drupal themes.

Thanks Jay, for joining us, and for being just as picky about your CSS as we are!

New themes: Blue Chip and Global Health

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Here at TopNotchThemes our goal is to deliver a wide variety of high-end Drupal themes. That means creating both wild and more straightforward themes. Our newest themes, Blue Chip and Global Health, fall into the latter category. Both of these themes are clean, bright, professional, and sharp.

Blue Chip has a pleasing and modern rounded look with a solid palette of blues and greys. The design is ideal for a professional financial or technical organization or firm looking to project a strong and efficient image.

Global Health uses blues and greys as well, but with more colorful touches of green and gold (and of course a completely different design) for a bright and cheery look that is both inviting and trustworthy. While it's mocked up as a health services theme, it'd be comfortable in a wide variety of professional service settings.

Both themes are available for immediate purchase and are of course packed with the usual TopNotchThemes Drupal features, cross-browser compatibility, and attention to detail.

New themes added: 

Showcase of newspaper sites on Drupal at NewsTools2008

Collage of news and magazine sites running Drupal

Members of the Drupal community participated yesterday at a gathering of journalists interested in news+technology. Drupal was showcased as an excellent tool for building news websites. You may have already seen some of the big news/magazine sites out there running Drupal, like The Onion, NY Observer, and Fast Company, but there were a few others that caught my eye.

NWSource, a gorgeous site for the Seattle area.  Couldn’t look less like Drupal.

The Columbia Spectator, a classic news site, very elegant and clearly making great use of Drupal’s content organization tools.

The Vineyard Voice, a community news site, which shows that a little can go a long way when polishing a Drupal site.

Themes for Drupal news websites

We’ve had a lot of interest in journalism-related Drupal themes, for newspaper, magazine, and local community sites.  We’re working on some of these now and would love your input (comment here or give us a shout) if you’re building a news site and could share more about what you are looking for! 

Get a daily dose of Drupal tips on Twitter

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Hello, my name is Stephanie and I’m a Twitterholic.

TopNotchThemes has created our own Twitter account (what the heck is Twitter?) where we’ll be sending out a bite-sized Drupal tip every day. Most of the tips are focused on site building, and novice to intermediate Drupallers, but we’ll probably throw a few advanced tips in there just to keep you on your toes.

For all of us who camp out on IRC, the forums, and Drupal Planet all day, here’s yet another medium to get your fix!

Add TopNotchThemes on Twitter

For the non-Twitterers among you, you can also get the daily tip via RSS.

TopNotchThemes launches first all-Drupal high-end theme store

Startup provides instantly downloadable Drupal themes with advanced features. Beautiful, professional-looking Drupal sites now within reach of small businesses and organizations – no designer needed.

April 22, 2008 – Oakland, CA - Collective Mind announced today the official unveiling of its premium Drupal theme store, TopNotchThemes.com. The store provides the first and largest offering of high-end templates for the extraordinarily successful open source content management system, Drupal. TopNotchThemes currently has a wide selection of Drupal themes, optimized for different styles and types of websites, and they will be rapidly increasing the size of their catalog over the coming months.

TopNotchThemes is a real milestone for the Drupal world: it’s a commercial template store whose designs are built with Drupal’s capabilities in mind. Their commitment to working with the community and their respect for Drupal’s GPL license are both critical. We are all excited to see their library grow!” says Jeff Eaton, developer for Lullabot and member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors.

Quick TNT theme facts:

  • Includes multiple configuration options to create different layouts
  • Can be uploaded and enabled on a Drupal website in seconds
  • Includes built-in support for popular third-party modules
  • Crafted by a team of expert Drupal themers

Over 100,000 people download Drupal every month. It astonished us that there weren’t themes of this caliber already available,” offers co-founder Stephanie Pakrul, on the motivation behind creating TopNotchThemes.

New themes: Rock Star and Legal Papers

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Another two new themes added to the TNT collection. Rock Star is dark, rich, and edgey with a palette of reds and blacks, while Legal Papers is an elegant, clean, and professional theme laid out in greys and burgundies. An ideal pair of themes for artists and professionals of all stripes.

New themes added: 

New themes: Green World and Hip Two Oh

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Two new themes joined the TNT library today. Both with green as prominent colours, but they couldn't be more different!

New themes added: 

TNT has Launched!

After a whole lot of work, we’ve finally launched the all-Drupal TopNotchThemes online store!

And we’re just getting started.

Drupal is an amazing content management system.  It is arguably the most powerful open source CMS available.  Just as important, it’s got a large and vibrant community of contributors and professionals who are constantly improving Drupal and deploying it everywhere.

We’ve been privileged to be participants in the Drupal revolution as themers, both independently and for leading development firm CivicActions.

The more we’ve grown to appreciate the power of Drupal, the more we’ve tried to find ways to make it look as great as it performs.  We’ve enjoyed theming some amazing sites (including Amnesty International, WITNESS, and MeNotMeth), but have been wanting to find a way to make great Drupal designs and theming available to people, organizations, and businesses who don’t have the budget for a fully-customized theme. 

Unfortunately, the power and flexibility of Drupal also make it a challenge to create themes that have a strong graphic personality, yet adapt to changes in content and layout.  Creating a distinctive Drupal theme for one site and one client is challenging enough; creating one for an unknown number of different sites is something else.

But we were determined.  Our goal is to provide a wide selection of unique themes for different types of sites.  The themes need to be powerful without requiring extra modules to be installed, flexible without becoming generic, pre-themed for essential Drupal modules, and well documented for those who aren’t intimately familiar with Drupal.  All at a price in line with the other costs involved in setting up a website you can be proud of. 

We think that we’ve struck a good balance on these requirements and we’re looking forward to delivering a reqular stream of high-quality themes to the Drupal community every month.

Join us as we do our part to make Drupal as beautiful as it is powerful.

Sneak peek at our Drupal theme store...

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Almost there! We’re just putting the final touches on the store this weekend and currently uploading our first batch of themes. Check in this week for the grand opening!