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12 Knockout Drupal Designs

Posted October 8th, 2008 by steph

Vancouver-based IMAGEX MEDIA has created some of the most gorgeous Drupal sites around, which is where most of these knockouts come from. Whenever you’re feeling like Drupal sites always have a certain "look" to them, here’s a great showcase of "I can’t believe it’s Drupal!"

Civitas Institute

CreativePro

Dalit Freedom Network

Discover Energy

FreshBrain

Free Acquia Marina Drupal Theme from TopNotchThemes

Posted September 30th, 2008 by chris

New Acquia Marina GPL theme from TopNotchThemesTopNotchThemes is excited to be able to offer our new Acquia Marina theme, developed for Acquia, as a free GPL-licensed theme on Drupal.org. This is the same theme that ships with the recently released Acquia Drupal distribution.

We’ve put a lot of research and effort into all of our Drupal themes, and we’re glad to have this opportunity to show off an example of the results to everyone, whether or not they choose to purchase one of our premium themes. Our goal is to pack as much power, flexibility, and gorgeous design as possible into each and every one of our themes, and Acquia Marina is no exception.

Designed especially for Acquia for blogs and community sites, Acquia Marina is also flexible enough to be used for a wide variety of site types and layouts. The theme includes 15 collapsible content regions and our advanced theme settings, which allow an incredible amount of customization from the point-and-click admin interface. All without requiring you to install any additional modules.

Got a few minutes to share your thoughts on Drupal?

Posted September 28th, 2008 by steph

We’re conducting a 13-question survey to better understand what users of Drupal find lacking in some specific areas, including themes, e-commerce, and support. The responses will primarily be used for a series of free reports, and also to help us create products/services that better serve your needs.

Personal/contact information is optional. We’ll also be sharing the (anonymized) results so they can benefit everyone.

Take the survey

Two new Drupal 6 themes, plus customer favourite Ubercart theme updated

Posted September 26th, 2008 by steph
Drupal 6 theme from TopNotchThemes: Fresh Start
Drupal 6 theme with Embedded Media Field multimedia theming from TopNotchThemes: Vidz
Drupal 6 theme for Ubercart 2 from TopNotchThemes: Sharp Sales

Two new Drupal 6 themes joined the TopNotchThemes family yesterday, Fresh Start and Vidz. Also worth noting is that our top selling theme for Ubercart, Sharp Sales, has now been updated to Ubercart 2 for Drupal 6, which is still in development but getting very close to a stable release. Ah, life on the bleeding edge!

Fresh Start is a clean and, um, fresh theme for Drupal 6. It's a wide two column theme where your sidebar can easily switch from left to right. Whether the (optional) sprouting plant is to be taken literally (perhaps for your environmental or grassroots organization) or metaphorically (new startup, anyone?), you can't go wrong with a light, modern look.

Vidz is a new Drupal 6 design that gets a little funky with custom layout theming for multimedia websites -- if you're using the Embedded Media Field module, the Vidz theme will give media nodes and teaser listings a nice floated layout. Of course it also would work great for a corporate site, blog, or online community.

New themes added: 
Fresh Start
Sharp Sales
Vidz

Review of Lynda.com's Drupal Essential Training video

Posted September 23rd, 2008 by tnt team
Screenshot of Drupal Essential Training with Tom Geller, from lynda.com
Screenshot of a diagram of Drupal in Drupal Essential Training from lynda.com

Lynda.com, a provider of educational materials which consists of an “Online Training Library”, recently released a 7 hour video course entitled “Drupal Essential Training” authored and narrated by Tom Geller.

Most of the courses at lynda.com are for graphic-arts software like Photoshop. The Drupal course was designed to be useful to — and understood by — the lynda.com subscribers. As such, it assumed no prior understanding of system administration, programming, or other skills that you’d find in a different sector of Drupal users. The course, as well as all other lynda.com courses, is available as part of a $25/month subscription, and will also be released on DVD [edit: DVD version now available].

A 4-1/2 minute discussion of requirements for the course is found in the free video “Checking Drupal’s requirements”.

This course covers basic concepts of content management and content management systems. Tom compares Drupal to other popular content management systems such as Joomla, Wordpress and MediaWiki and gives advice on when to use Drupal and when not to use Drupal.

Feeling that one of the biggest challenges for new users to Drupal, Tom focused an entire section to installation. “About 45 minutes of the course is dedicated to installation… and even that doesn’t touch on the many, many, MANY things that can go wrong”, Tom told us via email. “This is the first exposure that new users will have to Drupal: If they can’t get past the installation, the rest is moot”.

Looking for a Top Notch Drupal Sysadmin

Posted September 18th, 2008 by chris

TopNotchThemes is looking for a part-time high-level Drupal/LAMP sysadmin. If you've got lots of experience working with production Drupal site/multi-site setups and you know how to wring every last bit of performance out of Drupal on a LAMP stack, then we want to talk to you.

We need someone with solid Drupal and LAMP abilities who can also keep things secure and running smoothly. The position is part-time, with about 20 hours of immediate work and then a likely need for about 5 hours a week after that. More information on our Jobs page.

7 reasons why Ubercart is the right choice for Drupal e-commerce

Posted September 16th, 2008 by steph

We had to make a tough decision early this year — which Drupal e-commerce package was right for us? There are currently two full e-commerce solutions for Drupal, eCommerce and Ubercart.

We chose Ubercart and jumped in with both feet. We’re happy to say that nine months later, this has definitely shown itself to be the right choice.

This post isn’t really going to discuss the technical merits or specific features of each option. This is better served by doing your own research on each one to see if there are any particular features that you need. What I’m going to focus on here are the less tangible aspects; things that we have since found to be clear indicators of the strength of Ubercart.

1) Big names are using it

Prominent companies such as AOL and Warner Brothers Records has been using Ubercart for a while. More recently, Lullabot launched an Ubercart site for their conference registration (and will be covering UC in their upcoming book), and Acquia’s registration for their beta service currently uses Ubercart. Support from key players like this has a lot of weight in the Drupal community.

TemplateMonster causes Drupal theme nightmares

Posted September 8th, 2008 by steph

TemplateMonster eats Drupal themes for breakfastAs soon as I saw that TemplateMonster was offering Drupal themes, I had to take a closer look. In my earlier web design days, I admit that I’d used several templates from their site upon the request of clients. However, once div-based CSS layouts became predominant, TemplateMonster’s love of tables and inflexibility became tiring.

My first reaction to their Drupal themes was a bit of concern, knowing their track record with other complex themes and questionable legal history. But they couldn’t be that bad, right? At least they’re giving end users some choice in a world where beautiful Drupal themes aren’t on every corner.

You could argue that a competing provider of Drupal themes isn’t the best critic — but we know our stuff, and I think you’ll find this evaluation enlightening and also generally useful when evaluating the quality of any Drupal theme. Also, it’s difficult to find objective information about TemplateMonster, since most reviews are glowingly positive and just happen to be written by members of their affiliate program.

So, here are the facts…

Acquia partners with TopNotchThemes for commercially-supported Drupal distribution

Posted August 28th, 2008 by steph

Acquia and TopNotchThemes logos, partnered to provide Drupal themes with distribution

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve teamed up with Acquia to create new themes specifically for their upcoming distribution of Drupal, currently codenamed Carbon.  Dries and Jeff approached us in the spring about bundling TNT themes with their distribution, and we’ve been busily working behind the scenes over the summer to make this happen.

It was a natural match from the beginning, as both of our companies are focused on taking Drupal to the next level with a product that brings a huge amount of value to organizations.  Since this distribution will be GPL’d, it also gives us an opportunity to give themes back to the Drupal community. 

You’ll have to sign up for the beta in order to check out the first of the themes from TopNotchThemes that will be bundled with Acquia’s distribution.  Currently it’s in a private beta, but the doors will be opening further over the next month. I think you’ll be blown away by what Acquia has put together into a package that makes sense for both new and experienced Drupal users and service providers. 

Jay Wolf has been the key theme developer for this project, and he and Chris and I have been working closely with Acquia to craft designs and features that will benefit YOU the most!

Drupal 6 themes now available from TopNotchThemes!

Posted August 27th, 2008 by steph

Drupal 6 themes are ready!

Hot off the press, many of our themes are now available as Drupal 6 themes. Just in time for the stable releases that everyone’s been waiting for—CCK 2 and Views 2 for Drupal 6—you can now get an advanced theme for your Drupal 6 site from TopNotchThemes. Ubercart and Panels for D6 are also around the corner!

Not a coder? No problem.

Drupal 6 advanced theme settings

Our Drupal 6 themes have had a complete overhaul. With the new theme settings available in Drupal 6, you’ll have more of Drupal’s power in your hands. On one page you can easily personalize your theme for better SEO, configure the wording of common site text, choose how the author, date, taxonomy terms, and search results are shown, and more!

You receive free lifetime upgrades on our themes, so if you’ve purchased one of our Drupal 5 themes that’s been upgraded, you can log in and download the Drupal 6 version in your files area. The remaining Drupal 5 theme upgrades will be coming over the next couple of weeks, including our Ubercart themes.

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