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Updates and videos for Fusion
We’ve been very hard at work on the new Fusion themes and upcoming website. The third beta of Fusion will be coming in about a week, which will likely be our second-to-last beta. There are only a few items remaining before a release candidate.
Others in the Drupal community have been checking out Fusion’s potential, whether through releasing new themes or launching sites. Also, we’ve got initial docs up for both end users and subtheming.
If you haven’t had a chance to take it for a spin yet, Jeremy put together a pair of videos to give you a basic tour of Fusion and our first released subtheme, Acquia Prosper (the other Acquia themes are well on their way, just waiting for RTL).
Fusion progress: beta in sight
When that 76% gets to 100%, then we’ll be at a dev release for Fusion on drupal.org!
I just sent out download links to 40+ alpha testers, who are (hopefully) going to be soon flooding our inbox with glowing praise bug reports. The presentation at SFDUG on Monday went extremely well, with 70+ people in attendance! Since the announcement, we’ve talked with many people, developers and end users alike, who are super excited about what this could mean for Drupal themes — empowering both themers and site administrators to make Drupal sites even more beautiful. Thank you for your enthusiasm! It goes a long way as we’re working what sometimes feels like around the clock to make Drupal themes the best they can be.
TNT 2.0 and the future of Drupal themes with Fusion
Update: the Fusion base theme is now up on drupal.org, along with the Acquia Prosper subtheme! New site coming soon!
Since late last year we’ve been dreaming of a 2.0 for TopNotchThemes. Our current base theme packs in a TON of advanced features, but there is always room to evolve. So for the past few months we’ve been listening closely to our customers and the Drupal community, and plotting world domination a revolution in theming.
So much of what you want to do with your sites isn’t rocket science — if you’re already a Drupal themer! We’re talking about things like adding a slideshow or sidebar pullout menu, changing the theme width, adding a different list style, changing a block’s colours, centering banner ads, styling a View, floating article images, or changing the comment layout for a certain content type.
TopNotchThemes at Ubercamp/DrupalCamp Colorado
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
EDIT: Release is now up at http://drupal.org/project/acquia_prosper!
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
The 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?
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).
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!
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.
