New users to Drupal can be the greatest education in the world. We’ve learned so much from helping others in Drupal’s online support chat, maintaining issue queues, and fielding customer support requests from people implementing their first site with a TNT Drupal theme. 

It quickly became apparent that we were seriously lacking in the documentation department. So a few new things have come of this recently, which we hope will become great resources in the Drupal community at large:

TopNotchThemes Quickstart Guide: Build a Great Drupal Website - this is a free, illustrated, 24-page guide for that stage of Ok so I have Drupal installed — now what? It also serves as a guide to using some of the special features of our themes, but walks you through creating content with images, blocks, menus, organizing nodes with taxonomy, theme settings, and simple step-by-step examples of CCK and Views.

Theme handbook: Acquia Marina - this theme does some things a bit differently than themes you might’ve used before. It’s powerful, but some of these features need a little further explanation. We’re hoping this handbook page will address some of the most common questions (such as the collapsible regions creating different layouts, theme settings, block icons, PNG fix for IE6, etc) and also serve as a study for those looking to create their own complex themes.

Upcoming documentation

Ubercart documentation - Using Drupal’s chapter on setting up an Ubercart online store is vastly better than anything we could’ve written, so we’ve decided to license this chapter to provide free of charge to all our theme customers. Also coming up is our own Ubercart guide which focuses on the visual, usability, improving conversion, and customer experience side by optimizing your Ubercart site’s configuration.

Theming white paper for Drupal developers - on the other side of the spectrum, we’ve also had a number of Drupal developers using our themes for client projects. In order to address the needs of this emerging market, we (with the help of our writer extraordinaire, Tom Geller) did a survey and some interviews with developers, and are just finishing up a white paper that specifically addresses the challenges that developers face in the area of theming for Drupal. We’ll have a pile of these ready for our table at Drupalcon, as well as online for download next month.