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Drupal Projects

This autumn we’ve been busy with a couple of our ongoing Drupal projects, and now are ready to share with you the results of our work.

One of these projects, already known to some of you, is Drupalsites.net, the first and the largest Drupal showcase featuring Drupal-based site of all shapes and sizes, from blogs to portals, from portfolios to online stores.

Drupalsites.net was launched in October 2005 and in 7 years has grown from a small list of sites into an impressive Drupal showcase featuring over 4100 websites as of today.

Since then there were a lot of updates both in functionality and design, but the concept remains: Drupalsites.net is a non-commercial Drupal showcase, and we invite you to submit your Drupal creations to help spread the word about this CMS. Thank you for your input!

Take a look at Before and After of Drupalsites.net.

And the second project that had a ‘facelift’ is Budapestindex.com, Drupal-based Budapest guide that we run since 2004 for the fun of it. Here, we have introduced a new responsive Drupal theme, simple and clean, just how we prefer it for the websites rich in content. Later, we plan to build on this Drupal 7.x theme to offer it for free. Stay tuned!

Our themes available at drupal.org for download

Just a short announcement: our open source Drupal theme creations are now available at drupal.org for download. And well, of course... bug reports!

Check it out:
Noodle base theme (still in beta): http://drupal.org/project/noodle
ExtraStark experimental massive Drupal CSS reset: http://drupal.org/project/extrastark

ExtraStark theme. Ultimate Drupal 7 CSS reset

While we were working on Drupal 7 version of our base theme noodle something else came up: the ultimate organic Drupal CSS reset. Which eventually became a small demo theme called ExtraStark. We were asked many times, how can one do it, so here is the example:

Why do we call it organic? The answer is simple: we do not disable or alter any of Drupal core CSS, we just reset it with a tiny piece of reset.css.

Concept:

This theme is not a fully fledged Drupal theme, but more of a proof of concept. Quite so many designers new to Drupal complain about system CSS and how it makes styling much harder. Our experience actually proved absolutely opposite: many of core styles are just helpers, so you don't have to start from scratch, but you can rather reuse many existing styles.

The ExtraStark theme is created for those purists to demonstrate how easy it is to reset any core Drupal CSS style to zero. It resets margins, paddings, font properties, etc., and it does the job much more radical way then original Stark theme.

The theme is not intended to be used on production sites (it's too bare for that), though you can use it as basis for more graphical theme.

Features:

The main attraction is reset.css, which by popular demand would include slightly remixed HTML5Boilerplate CSS reset as well. But there is more too:

  • form elements reset (so you'll miss nice enough default D7 buttons), it supplies only borders to make them visible
  • original Stark layout (layout.css) has no margins
  • the theme does reset front end styles, but not the backend
  • one anti-reset: font is set to sans-serif (in style.css, just hate small serifs)

Validation:

  • W3C CSS Valid (CSS level 3)
  • XHTML + RDFa Valid

Browser Compatibility:

IE (6,7,8), WebKit (Safari, Chrome), Mozilla (FireFox, Camino, SeaMonkey), Opera (8,9,10).

Disclaimer:

As usual, the theme was tested with Drupal 7 core modules only. If you have contrib modules installed then you might need more resets. Please DO submit an issue to module developers if you see some excessive or unneeded CSS.

More to read:

A nice and clear write up on Drupal CSS concepts by Jacine Luisi.

Downloads:

UPDATE: you can download the theme directly from now on at http://drupal.org/project/extrastark

Or check the gitgub project.

New base theme: Noodle

We were quite silent here at noodorg for a while. But the work has been going on without any stops. Recently, we had our base theme called "noodle" completely rewritten. It is now open source so you can get a copy (currently in beta) at github: http://github.com/betarobot/noodle

UPDATE: you can download the theme directly from now on at http://drupal.org/project/noodle

Just a few words about the theme. The previous code base was used to power dozens of custom drupal themes made by us for over 4 years. The new codebase is much cleaner and more modular.

Noodle theme is intented primarily for developers and themers. The theme was developed to allow rapid creation of custom (sub)themes. It includes basic styles, typography and features which I've found to be useful on majority of projects over the years, from less complicated blogs to more complex corporate sites. Compared to many existing Drupal theme frameworks it works right away, it is lightweight, there are no zillions of settings to stick to. Actually, I believe the majority of theme settings should be hardcoded anyway not to allow the end user to ruin the original design.

I'll keep away from describing all the features, but here are a few:

  • 19 block regions (you can disable them in subtheme.info file)
  • accordion block region in the sidebar (nice to crop less used content)
  • meerkat block region at the bottom (http://meerkat.jarodtaylor.com/)
  • block region in node
  • on mouse over block edit badges at any place
  • nicely styled comments
  • compact comment forms
  • foldable comment forms to save screen space
  • nice forums
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