Drupal Themes from TopNotchThemes - Premium Drupal 5 & 6 themes, designed just for Drupal

Drupal humor: The Drupal Magic 8-ball

steph — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:15:14 -0400

And now for something completely different with a little Friday evening amusement from Drupal IRC...

If there was a Drupal Magic 8-ball, what would it look like?

Proposed responses:
"There's a module for that"
"The answer is Views" (already on a t-shirt)
"Ask webchick"
"File an issue"
"Patches welcome"

What else? :)

Review of Bryght free Drupal hosting plans

jeremy — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:01:56 -0400

Bryght is now offering hosting packages which help bring Drupal to the masses. Their hosting plans currently come in two flavors, “Bryght Light” and “VPS Hosting”. Bryght Light offers a default Drupal install with an “out-of-the-box” appeal, great for users who want to leverage the benefits of Drupal but don’t want to have to install and configure it from the ground up. Sign up for a hosting plan, obtain access to your site, enjoy Drupal! Can’t get much easier than that.

Similar to Acquia Drupal, Bryght has a default install of Drupal with all sorts of popular modules to help build your site. This saves the average user a lot of time researching and downloading specific modules since most of what you need (or might use) is already there. They also handle all of the support for your Drupal site and hosting.

Here is a list modules you can expect to find upon signing up for the Bryght Light hosting plan.

Akismet
Autolocale
Bryght (Various Bryghtlicious enhancements and ponies)
Calendar
CCK
Date Api
Feedburner
GoogAnalytics
Image
Image Assist
Image Gallery
Image Attach
Mollom
OpenID
Pathauto
Persistent Login
Reseller
SimpleMenu
TinyMCE
Token
Views

TopNotchThemes sponsors DrupalCon 2009 in Washington DC

chris — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:48:28 -0400

TopNotchThemes is proud to announce that we have signed on to become a sponsor of the upcoming DrupalCon in Washington D.C. this March 4-7, 2009.

One of Drupal’s most appealing features is the positive relationship between the development & user communities and the growing number of businesses that support Drupal. We’re glad to be a part of that relationship, and we’re excited to be attending DrupalCon as sponsors for the first time.

Given Drupal’s prominence amongst non-profit, progressive, and issues-focused websites, Washington D.C. is an especially appropriate setting in which to explore a technology that is empowering grassroots efforts everywhere. More than anything else, DrupalCon will be—as always—an amazing experience in connecting with people who are passionate about what Drupal is and what it can do to help change the world in ways both large and small.

Here’s hoping that you’ll be able to make it to this DrupalCon and that we’ll get a chance to meet as many of you as possible, especially those of you who have been so supportive of us as we work hard to create Drupal themes that help make Drupal as beautiful as it is powerful.

12 Knockout Drupal Designs

steph — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 15:11:50 -0400

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

chris — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:20:47 -0400

TopNotchThemes 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?

steph — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:58:36 -0400

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

steph — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:36:12 -0400

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.

Review of Lynda.com's Drupal Essential Training video

tnt team — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:55:12 -0400

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

chris — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:14:44 -0400

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

steph — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:52:44 -0400

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.