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Theming — the Drupal developer’s challenge

Building a Drupal theme requires a wide range of skills. Is your project best suited for a fully custom design and theme, a free Drupal theme, DIY approach, or using a premium theme?

Based on a survey of hundreds of Drupal users and developers, TopNotchThemes has created the following 11-page report. This report covers topics such as design/theming budgets for projects, average size of development shops, number of projects per year, and an in-depth look at the various theming options when implementing a Drupal site.

Which title best describes you?

Your email address will not be shared or added to any list. We will only contact you if you request to be contacted below.

TopNotchThemes is working on an exciting new theme system targeted at Drupal developers and power users. We would love to ask you a few questions about how you work and what you're looking for, so we can build the best possible solution. Please check this box if you are interested and we will be in touch with more details!

TopNotchThemes at Ubercamp/DrupalCamp Colorado

DrupalCamp Colorado Gold Sponsor

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…

Kicking Ubercart up a notch

In partnership with Ubercart, Acquia, and Commerce Guys, TopNotchThemes is creating a free premium Drupal theme optimized for Ubercart e-commerce sites.

Our first community themes, Acquia Marina and Acquia Slate have been wildly successful, bringing more power, flexibility, and beautiful styling to thousands of Drupal sites.  We wanted to go further with a third theme and through our relationship with Ubercart, knew that this amazing suite of modules for Drupal needed the polished look and feel it deserves.

The theme will be optimized with the UberDrupal installation profile (based on Acquia Drupal) by Commerce Guys, who we’ll be working closely with to help turn this installation profile and demo site into something that really shows off the power of Ubercart.  Features here are to be determined, but will likely include things like ImageCache presets, blocks, Ubercart settings, and other contrib modules optimized for a full e-commerce site.

Now, we need your input to make this theme even better!  Here’s a list of the features and style we’re going to be aiming for, but we’d love to know what else you’d like to see in a killer Ubercart theme.  The initial design concepts are being started and we’ll soon set up a project page and post progress along the way.

Lullabot-Learning CCK for Drupal Review

BlocksThe 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

One theme, many layouts

There have been quite a few times where the question arises of how many layouts are possible with one of our themes. I chose RubySands to demonstrate the flexibility of a theme. It’s amazing how many different layouts can be created with the different placement of blocks and content. The framework is all there, just a matter of bringing everything together and making it work for you.

Generate your own Drupal themes -- too good to be true?

Drupal theme generated by Artisteer software and its settings
Drupal theme generated by Artisteer software and its settings
Drupal theme generated by Artisteer software and its settings
Drupal theme generated by Artisteer software and its settings
Drupal theme generated by Artisteer software and its settings
Drupal theme generated by Artisteer software and its settings

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.

ÜberTip #3: Best practices for e-commerce product images

Photos are the face of your products for your online store. Any photo is better than no photo, but improving your product images can have a huge impact on sales, reduce customer support requests, and minimize refunds or exchanges. Here are some tips for showcasing your products at their best in Übercart.

Make product images clear and consistent

Print catalogs typically hire one illustrator or photography studio to create all the product images in a section; at the very least, they have an art director to ensure that the tone and style are consistent. Even if you don’t have that luxury—if you get your graphics from multiple sources, for example—a few minutes in Photoshop can turn a visual jumble into a collection where all the pieces look like they belong. You can do this by processing all images to have the same proportions, or be the same apparent size, or have the same effects (such as a drop shadow or glow). 

Wine glass photo on busy backgroundWine glass on isolated white background
Which one of these more clearly shows what’s being sold?  With the one on the right, there can be no mistake.  Imagine your customers trying to quickly scan over a page full of product photos like the one on the left!

Newspaper and blog themes for Drupal

Two themes of a new breed have launched on TopNotchThemes recently. We’ve heard a lot from our customers and potential customers about the need for real newspaper and blog themes for Drupal. You ask and we theme!

Extra! Extra!

What makes a Drupal newspaper theme? Navigation is very important, and horizontal dropdowns are a favorite of news sites everywhere. Also a prominent search, plenty of advertising spots, featured content, and of course, lots of block regions for building your site. This theme hits on all of these and provides a clean grey/blue design, with accents of red and a featured block region at the top.

Copywrite

Wordpress gets all the open source blogging platform glory, but Drupal is actually an amazing system for building a blog-based website because you can go so much further. However, it’s definitely been lacking in the theme department. Why is Copywrite a great blog theme? It’s got a custom style for AdSense blocks, tons of regions, a flexible two or three column layout, and a blog-oriented post style, in terms of the way taxonomy, author/date, and other node links are laid out. We’ve also thrown in icons for tags, comments, users, and email/print links.

New themes added: 

Drupal vs. Joomla: a frank comparison from an IBM consultant

We were very fortunate recently to have a consultant from IBM purchase one of our Drupal themes for a personal project. Before purchasing the theme, we discussed a bit about Joomla and Drupal, focusing mostly on the difference between where functionality and eye candy lies in Drupal vs. Joomla.

I say fortunate because after this consultant evaluated the two CMSes, I received an email with a fascinating and detailed comparison of these early experiences with Drupal and Joomla. I was allowed to post this (anonymously) here to our blog so the community(ies) at large can benefit from this great write-up.

I won’t interject too much of my own thoughts here, other than that a) I agree with just about everything being said here, and b) the good news is that a ton of this stuff is a strong focus for Drupal 7. I see the Drupal community also putting more effort into the many approaches currently being worked on for pre-configuring/populating a site (Installation profiles, Patterns, Spaces, Drush, etc).

Edit: we’re getting some very interesting comments from Joomla users as well, make sure you read the comments!

The full email follows below

FYI, here are my observations on Drupal after about 40-50 hours with the tool (I have experience with Joomla, DotNetNuke, and of course our solution at IBM: Websphere Portal, WCM, and Portlet Factory). I plan to evaluate for another few days, before making a decision on whether to implement using Joomla or Drupal.  The hosting costs and portlet dev cost for Websphere Portal are too high, or I’d be using an IBM solution.

ÜberTip #2: Simplify!

Ubercart product page before and after -- defaults compared to our optimized (simplified!) version

The second post in our ÜberTip series (read/download the full guide) is an important attitude for any e-commerce site — keep it simple!  Drupal can be prey to "open buffet syndrome" on modules and features.  All that exciting functionality is there at your fingertips, an enabled block away!  But when you’re trying to encourage your customers to part with their hard-earned money on what you’re selling, you don’t want to distract them from that primary goal.

Dealing with Drupal’s defaults

Unless you’re running a social networking site with chat functionality, do customers really need to know who else is logged in?  For that matter, Drupal’s default Navigation and User Login blocks are unnecessary for most e-commerce sites.  Disable whatever blocks aren’t absolutely necessary, especially once the user gets to the checkout pages.

Focus on essential information

Beyond blocks, consider the content of individual pages. Ruthlessly cut words and graphics that don’t serve your purpose. That’s no easy task, as was illustrated by the writer Edgar Allen Poe when he turned in a novel on deadline: "Here it is, at 400 pages. I could have made it 300 pages if you’d given me more time."

Make the buying process obvious

Assuming that your purpose is to sell products, make sure that customers are never more than a click away from buying — and make that button big, unambiguous, and attractive.

Übercart does some of the work for you by providing a Shopping Cart block that you can (and should) make visible on every page, but you can do more by emphasizing the "Add to cart" button on product pages.

You can make your own adjustments by tweaking a theme’s CSS according to these instructions.