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Drupal themes from TopNotchThemes

Our sexiest (and Drupal 6-iest) themes yet!

Posted August 25th, 2008 by steph
Pump Up The Volume with a sexy, dark Drupal 6 theme
Go Green, new corporate or blog Drupal 6 theme

An exciting day today, our first exclusively-for-Drupal-6 themes have just been released! These two have been crafted lovingly from scratch just for Drupal 6, with all the goodies that this shiny new version of Drupal has to offer.

Pump Up The Volume

I have no hesitation in dubbing Pump Up The Volume the sexiest Drupal theme TopNotchThemes has ever created. One of our favourite designers really blew us away with this design, and we put in the blood, sweat, and tears to match. An uber-flexible 1/2/3-column layout, dark design with gradients and rounded corners, and punches of colour really make it shine. Heck, we’ve even given you some custom graphical buttons for Drupal’s defaults. This would be an amazing theme for a band site or social network.

Go Green

Slightly less rockstar-sexy but equally polished, Go Green is a light green and blue theme for Drupal 6 that would be great for a multi-user blog site with lots of text, or a corporate or service site. There are 17 flexible, collapsible regions, so you’ll never run out of places to put your content. Vary the number of columns and active highlighted regions and you can create dozens of unique layouts that suit your home page, section landing pages, and full node content pages.

New themes added: 
Go Green
Pump Up The Volume

So you wanna change a color in your Drupal theme

Posted August 8th, 2008 by jeremy

Non-scary Drupal theming basics — CSS

File location

Usually when you download and install a Drupal theme the first thing you want to do is customize the look and feel so it’s not so “templatey” (if that’s a word). It’s best to find a theme which has the layout you like and worry about the colors of fonts and backgrounds later as those can easily be changed in the theme’s “style.css” file.

The “style.css” file is located in the root directory of your theme files.

Changing the color of links

Link colors and styles are changed in your theme’s CSS file. Open up your theme’s “style.css” file and locate the code that looks similar to this:

a:link,
a:visited {
color: #86bd21;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: bold;
 }

The code within the “{…}” will be applied to the link styles. This is where colors, font styles, background colors and more as specified for the specific element.

For this example I want my link styles to be red instead of the green which was previously specified. I like the underline and the bold so I’m going to leave those alone.

a:link,
a:visited {
color: #ff0000;
text-decoration: underline;
font-weight: bold;
}

File location

Growing the TNT team

Posted August 5th, 2008 by steph

We're very happy to (slightly belatedly) announce that Jeremy Caldwell has joined the TopNotchThemes crew full time! Jeremy's been designing and theming Drupal for two years, and has made several contributions to the Drupal community. He also blogs over at Nerdliness.com. He's currently hard at work putting the last pieces into place for upgrading our themes to Drupal 6.

TopNotchThemes is focused on becoming the world's best source for high-quality Drupal themes. We're excited to add Jeremy's talent and energy to the team as we reach for that goal.

Slides from presentation on Drupal themes

Posted August 3rd, 2008 by steph

For those who missed it or would like a copy of the slides, here is a PDF of our presentation on Drupal themes that we recently did at the Berkeley Drupal User Group.  The stage of "I know I need a Drupal theme but I’m not sure what to do next" is an easy place to get lost when you’re new to Drupal!  We had a great Q&A session afterwards, with about 35 people in attendance. 

It’s nothing fancy, but we covered the basics of:

  • What does a theme do?
  • How can I get a Drupal theme?
  • How do I get a Drupal site design or hire a themer?
  • How can I evaluate the quality and features of a theme?

Download the PDF of the presentation

Coming up…

Stop by the meeting at the end of August to learn more about the Patterns module and see a breakdown of how a community networking site was created, presented by Gravitek Labs.

Understanding Drupal training DVD review

Posted July 31st, 2008 by steph

Understanding Drupal DVD coverIt’s the start of a new era, with the release of the first educational Drupal DVD now available!  Lullabot, a leading Drupal service and training provider, has created the first DVD in their series.  It is an introduction for new users to Drupal, and will run you $40 for the DVD, or $30 for the download.  We grabbed a bucket of popcorn, watched this video, and share our thoughts below.

Format

The video is a high resolution DVD or download (1280x720px), and runs 1 hour, 4 minutes.  It is a combination of Q&A with members of the Lullabot team, graphical animations to explain concepts, and video captures of the Drupal interface.

The bigger picture

It starts out with a slideshow of Drupal sites and a discussion of Drupal’s capabilities.  This section is great for those entirely unfamiliar with Drupal, or even a CMS or open source software in general. 

The first 13 minutes cover:

  • What is a CMS?
  • What is LAMP?
  • Drupal’s modular approach
  • Discussion of Drupal as a development platform
  • GPL, and the freedom of open source
  • The benefits of the Drupal community
  • The learning curve involved with Drupal

I appreciated that they discussed important components of the Drupal ecosphere, instead of just focusing on the technical aspects. 

Drupal 6 Screencasts - Views 2, CCK 2, Panels 2

Posted July 27th, 2008 by steph

CCK, Views, and Panels race to catch up with Drupal 6

Now that Views and CCK have hit release candidate (read: stable, almost ready for primetime) versions for Drupal 6, we should start seeing a significant crossover from new sites being built in Drupal 6 instead of Drupal 5.  If you’re new to Drupal, or simply exploring Drupal 6 for the first time, here are a few screencasts to get you up to speed on the new versions of the most important modules for Drupal.

Views 2

Introduction to Views 2 in Drupal 6
A 10-minute video that will give you an excellent introduction to using the new version of Views.  This video is a bit older and some of the interface is different compared to the current release.  However, if you want a quick overview, this is the video for you. 

New Features in Views 2
At over half an hour, this screencast goes into much more detail about Views, and if you want a more extensive tutorial with narration, give this one a watch.  It doesn’t cover all the new features, but Greg’s done a great job of showing off what Views can do!

Also, make sure you install the Advanced Help module to get quick links to help topics while building your views.

Evaluating your options for a Drupal theme

Posted July 17th, 2008 by steph

TNT presenting at Berkeley Drupal User Group next Thursday

Steph & Chris from TopNotchThemes will be giving a session at the Berkeley Drupal Users Group meeting on Thursday, July 24th from 12-1:30pm. We’ll be covering the process of finding, reviewing, and selecting the right theme for your Drupal site.

Should you hire a design firm to create a fully custom theme? Do you have mockups already? Are you working on a low-budget project and need to know the best way to modify what’s out there? How can you tell if a theme is any good? We’ll answer this and more!

Get more info and directions here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/13292

Ubercart and TopNotchThemes rockin' Drupal e-commerce

Posted June 18th, 2008 by steph

June is an exciting month for both Ubercart and TopNotchThemes! Over a year since their initial alpha release, Ubercart released version 1.0 earlier this month. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Ubercart, you can read more about the project and also see why Drupal shines as an e-commerce platform.

To help you get started, we’ve added a handy tutorial to our site for creating an online store with Drupal.

We know that a beautiful e-commerce site built on an open source platform can be hard to come by, especially with the complexity of theming for e-commerce systems. Helping to change this perspective, we’ve just added another two Ubercart themes to the TopNotchThemes library, Sharp Sales and Stockholm!

Ubercart themes get a lot of extra TLC from our team, with additional styling of blocks for the shopping cart, bestselling and featured products, and various catalog displays. Product nodes, catalog grids, and categories get custom theming, along with the user’s cart and checkout forms. Ubercart themes come with all our usual TNT theme goodies too, so they work just fine for a non-Ubercart Drupal site.

Now that Ubercart 1.0 is out the door, the UC team is hard at work on the Drupal 6 upgrade, which will bring numerous other improvements. Congrats to the team on a great release, and we look forward to continuing to make Ubercart look its best!

New themes added: 
Sharp Sales
Stockholm

SocialistWorker - a stellar Drupal-based news site

Posted May 23rd, 2008 by steph
Front page Panel of SocialistWorker.org
Story node on SocialistWorker.org
Print version of a story on SocialistWorker.org
Send-to-a-friend feature on SocialistWorker.org

Yesterday we attended the Berkeley Drupal User Group meeting and saw a fantastic showcase by Derek Wright (dww) on the recently re-launched SocialistWorker.org.

This is a classic newspaper-on-Drupal site. As far as I understand it, this magazine has existed in print form for years, and was looking to overhaul their online presence with a CMS backing it. They also wanted to go from a weekly to a daily edition. This site makes extensive use of Panels 2, Views, ImageCache, and CCK content types/fields to create a highly functional site without much custom development.

Front page

Several custom Panels were defined, that the editors can choose from when laying out their home page each day, with subtle variations on the size of the leading story, column widths, etc.

  • Front page is entirely drag-and-drop, using Panels 2
  • Editors can select combinations of headers (with configurable sizes), teaser images, story teasers, related links
  • A draft Panel for tomorrow’s front page exists, so the editors can lay it out in advance

With the swift press of one very large red button:

Highlighting some Drupal site recipes

Posted May 11th, 2008 by steph
drupal-site-recipes.jpg

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.

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