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Ubercart and TopNotchThemes rockin' Drupal e-commerce
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!
SocialistWorker - a stellar Drupal-based news site
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
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.
Welcoming Jay to the TopNotchThemes team
We'd like to officially welcome a new member of our theming team, Jay Wolf!
Yes, we have stolen him away from his plans for world domination, and perhaps delayed his efforts toward contributing a theme starting with every letter of the alphabet to Drupal.org. Jay has recently joined our team as a full time themer and the fruits of his labour are just starting to show.
Jay is a long time member of the Drupal community, and you may remember him from such themes as Amadou (which I have often recommended to people as an awesome theme), Barron, Celju, and Golden Hour. He'll be assisting us in turning our designs into awesome, feature rich Drupal themes.
Thanks Jay, for joining us, and for being just as picky about your CSS as we are!
Showcase of newspaper sites on Drupal at NewsTools2008
Members of the Drupal community participated yesterday at a gathering of journalists interested in news+technology. Drupal was showcased as an excellent tool for building news websites. You may have already seen some of the big news/magazine sites out there running Drupal, like The Onion, NY Observer, and Fast Company, but there were a few others that caught my eye.
NWSource, a gorgeous site for the Seattle area. Couldn’t look less like Drupal.
The Columbia Spectator, a classic news site, very elegant and clearly making great use of Drupal’s content organization tools.
The Vineyard Voice, a community news site, which shows that a little can go a long way when polishing a Drupal site.
Themes for Drupal news websites
We’ve had a lot of interest in journalism-related Drupal themes, for newspaper, magazine, and local community sites. We’re working on some of these now and would love your input (comment here or give us a shout) if you’re building a news site and could share more about what you are looking for!
Get a daily dose of Drupal tips on Twitter
Hello, my name is Stephanie and I’m a Twitterholic.
TopNotchThemes has created our own Twitter account (what the heck is Twitter?) where we’ll be sending out a bite-sized Drupal tip every day. Most of the tips are focused on site building, and novice to intermediate Drupallers, but we’ll probably throw a few advanced tips in there just to keep you on your toes.
For all of us who camp out on IRC, the forums, and Drupal Planet all day, here’s yet another medium to get your fix!
Add TopNotchThemes on Twitter
For the non-Twitterers among you, you can also get the daily tip via RSS.
TopNotchThemes launches first all-Drupal high-end theme store
Startup provides instantly downloadable Drupal themes with advanced features. Beautiful, professional-looking Drupal sites now within reach of small businesses and organizations – no designer needed.
April 22, 2008 – Oakland, CA - Collective Mind announced today the official unveiling of its premium Drupal theme store, TopNotchThemes.com. The store provides the first and largest offering of high-end templates for the extraordinarily successful open source content management system, Drupal. TopNotchThemes currently has a wide selection of Drupal themes, optimized for different styles and types of websites, and they will be rapidly increasing the size of their catalog over the coming months.
“TopNotchThemes is a real milestone for the Drupal world: it’s a commercial template store whose designs are built with Drupal’s capabilities in mind. Their commitment to working with the community and their respect for Drupal’s GPL license are both critical. We are all excited to see their library grow!” says Jeff Eaton, developer for Lullabot and member of the Drupal Association Board of Directors.
Quick TNT theme facts:
- Includes multiple configuration options to create different layouts
- Can be uploaded and enabled on a Drupal website in seconds
- Includes built-in support for popular third-party modules
- Crafted by a team of expert Drupal themers
“Over 100,000 people download Drupal every month. It astonished us that there weren’t themes of this caliber already available,” offers co-founder Stephanie Pakrul, on the motivation behind creating TopNotchThemes.
