We’ve been very hard at work on the new Fusion themes and upcoming website. The third beta of Fusion will be coming in about a week, which will likely be our second-to-last beta. There are only a few items remaining before a release candidate.

Others in the Drupal community have been checking out Fusion’s potential, whether through releasing new themes or launching sites. Also, we’ve got initial docs up for both end users and subtheming.

If you haven’t had a chance to take it for a spin yet, Jeremy put together a pair of videos to give you a basic tour of Fusion and our first released subtheme, Acquia Prosper (the other Acquia themes are well on their way, just waiting for RTL).

Update: the Fusion base theme is now up on drupal.org, along with the Acquia Prosper subtheme! New site coming soon!

Since late last year we’ve been dreaming of a 2.0 for TopNotchThemes. Our current base theme packs in a TON of advanced features, but there is always room to evolve. So for the past few months we’ve been listening closely to our customers and the Drupal community, and plotting world domination a revolution in theming.

So much of what you want to do with your sites isn’t rocket science — if you’re already a Drupal themer! We’re talking about things like adding a slideshow or sidebar pullout menu, changing the theme width, adding a different list style, changing a block’s colours, centering banner ads, styling a View, floating article images, or changing the comment layout for a certain content type.

TopNotchThemes is proud to be a Gold Sponsor at DrupalCamp Colorado, coming up in ten short days! Most of the TNT team will be there, and we’ve got two sessions proposed:

• Increase ROI with a user-friendly, great looking Ubercart store — if you want to hear about the handful of easy changes we made to our Drupal/Ubercart store on TopNotchThemes.com that doubled our conversion rate, this is a session you don’t want to miss!  We’ll be talking about design and e-commerce best practices for improving customer experience.
• Are Panels and Skinr the future of point-and-click Drupal theming?  Skinr (along with the Studio theme) got a lot of buzz at the recent Drupal designers (D4D) camp, and we’ll be talking about this approach, along with Panels 3 theming to give you a taste of what UI-selectable styling in Drupal can look like.

The sessions are still yet to be chosen, so please add your vote (two days left!) if you’d like to see them at the camp.

We’ll also be demoing the first (semi-)public preview of something very exciting in the works from TopNotchThemes…

The Content Construction Kit allows you to add custom fields to nodes using a web browser.

CCK is one of the most popular Drupal modules, with most Drupal sites using it because it gives much more flexibility and control over your content. It is a core building block for many websites.

Here is an overview of Lullabot’s new Learning CCK Video:

• Intro – Setting up what examples will be used and beginning to add fields to content
• Content Types in Drupal Core – How to add content in the basic default
• The Content Construction Kit – How to add extra content beyond core
• Adding a New CCK Field – Adding new fields
• Text Fields /User Reference – Creating dummy users and roles and how to add user reference field
• CCK Formatters – Formatting data and how it appears
• How CCK Stores Data – A visual of how you data looks when it is stored behind the scenes
• File Field/ Node References – Second content type and linking from one node to another
• Multiple Value Shared Fields – Creating multiple field options
• Options that Change the Database – How to edit content to change in the database and options that change the database. How to minimize text in the database
• Additional CCK Modules – Showing other modules you can use (Date, Calendar, Image Fields)
• Field Level Permissions – Permission options and how to configure permissions
• Multiple Value Widgets – Creating multiple selections in fields

Artisteer has been generating some buzz lately. With this (Windows-only, as of this time) software, you can generate unlimited static XHTML/CSS, Wordpress, Joomla, and now with the $129.95 "Standard Edition", Drupal themes.

This could be an exciting way for theming, a historically challenging endeavour for new and experienced Drupallers alike, to be within reach for many more users.

The premise seemed a bit hokey at first after watching their demo — Artisteer doesn’t ‘come with’ themes, it generates them from random or assembled collections of combinations of different aspects of your theme, such as:

• Layout
• Color scheme
• Header
• Background images
• Typography
• Article styles
• Block styles
• Buttons
• Menu

I had to see this for myself and downloaded the trial.