So after a few years research, learning, doing, crying, hair pulling, hitting myself in the head with a hammer and a few months worth of group discussion reading I feel that it's time for me to make a move on my asperations to start designing Drupal themes and I need some input from the community, as afterall this idea is for the community.
Basically I've been going through a discussion that started a few years ago and haven't seen any great difference or progression on the subject of getting designers into Drupal, so here's the chance to. One thing i've learnt from my experience of designing with other content management systems is that to really get something people will like, use, download, whatever it needs to be something that has the input of the community as the community knows what the community wants so this is my attempt at doing what people have been talking about for what I can see to have been some time without stepping on anyones toes or causing uneccessary wars with other designers/themers. This isn't a contest or a d@#* measuring exercise, I merely would like to give something back for the efforts that have allowed me to create several successful client sites using Drupal.
What I am rabbiting on about is a contrib theme, that's on the same level design wise as what's on offer to other CMS' which I won't name for fear of being gang-ranted at. Currently the contrib themes on Drupal are half decent, some have more functionality than inspector gadgets swiss army knife but lack creativity and others are the opposite, in some cases the themer has hit the nail on the head and has both "cheer". I am not interested in designing/theming something that allows you to plot a map of how to get from Wales to Japan by sea, what I'm really after is the communities opinion on what themes are potentially missing that are designed for a specific subject or style or what people think would be a good addition to what's already available.
Anything is doable and will be considered(in design terms), the theme will have some form of basic structure/features i.e 3 column, collapsable regions, 960px width, the possibility of additional classes for adding icons to lists etc and be compatible with a few popular contrib modules which will also be something you can request. I had thought about doing this for a base theme but as this is more about design/appearance I'd like to keep my toolset as flexible as possible.
Bare in mind this is an idea/request to start something that could potentially turn into an annual thing if it was successful so please keep your requests sensible, I am a designer after all so my theming/feature implementation skills are limited to custom themes, I still need to study advanced theme rocket science.
Any feedabck/request is appreciated.
Andy
Comments
Basically a really nice
Basically a really nice generic design - something that has very wide application, forget about a themed theme (like a sports theme, or club theme etc etc) - those will go down like a tonne of bricks for Drupal. If you could support with flair the ecommerce modules like Ubercart and Commerce module, then that would be a winner.
You should make it a subtheme of Adaptivetheme or Fusion, and make it colorable also. Simple thing is dude is that end users love the ability to tweak their site without coding, because most people are not coders, they rely entirely on being able to point and click. Just look at the most popular themes, they all have a lot of theme settings or are colorable. They may not be the most beautiful themes, but they are configurable - keep that in mind.
For example you already cut out a big group of people by saying "960 width, 3 columns" - bummer for those that want 1020 width, 2 sidebars on the right and to have them different widths - this is very rudimentary expectation - Adaptivetheme and Fusion can do with without costing you anything.
Don't hack any crap into the theme like a built in slideshow or other such rubbish Joomla/WP theme makers are so fond of, Drupal has modules that do that stuff, so give the end user a break and just give them a truck load of regions.
So keep it simple, generic, very beautiful, use one of the very configurable base themes and do it for Drupal 7. If you want to ride the HTML5 wave use Adaptivetheme for D7, its HTML5.
Good points rasied
Thanks for the response Jeff.
In terms of the column feature, I am still to find a site aside from a publishing or media related site that use more than one sidebar before or after the main content. I can understand the option of giving a user the most amount of freedom and flexibility but I can't understand why you would when it's something that a small % of sites use especially in a commercial capacity unless it's in the genre of what I have mentioned above and the majority of those are custom themes that don't require such flexibility.
As I outlined in my OP I have done a few years research into commercial themes and when comparing themes on offer vs user showcase I can't see this feature being implemented as much as I would of thought. If it makes the difference between someone using the end solution that I create versus another then it's obviously worth putting in, but my idea was to create something that primarily looks good and has enough for someone to create a site with and be happy with the design, whether they have to do a small amount of coding themselves is something I would expect site developers to be able to achieve and really this isn't a massive feat to accomplish even with a basic text editor.
The width however is something that I agree with as I must admit I have gotten used to the 960gs as a standard so I'll have a think on that one.
Hacking crap isn't something that I had even thought about, there's plenty of modules on offer so there is no need for me to hardcode anything into the theme that isn't achievable by other means i.e with views etc.
Making the theme generic is what I had in mind, really the points you've raised with the overall design is what I had been thinking about but the main point of this exercise for me was to bring a really good looking theme which is where I'm trying to look at the pros and cons of using a base theme for what I would like to achieve and if I didn't how much I would have to code myself in the backend. The amount of regions I'd like to be able to offer is a lot more than what a few of the base themes offer and by adding more I'd be getting into the realms of further developing someone elses solution, possibly. At the end of the day I am a designer so I wanted to bring a design that would give a basic feature set that could be furthered by the site developers own initiative, but enable them to have something that requires little design contribution.
It's not that I don't like base themes or see their advantages, It just wasn't the idea that I set out to do with this exercise, the discussions that I had read were asking for designers to get into Drupal which to me is still my primary goal, being able to produce that cailbre of theme whether it means less pointing and clicking.
More to think about...
On the column feature point,
On the column feature point, my personal take on it is that it is something drupal can do well, although I really think that the concept a sidebars in general can mainly be attributed to the Wordpress/Blogger domination on the mainstream design world. Blog layouts work well with whole sidebar concept but it is not necessarily one that translates well into business sites any more.
Drupals major plus feature is the region/block combination, and whilst it may just be splitting terminological hairs, a sidebar is just a region which happens to be at the side. However when we think of the term "sidebar", it is equal to the main area usually in height, whereas we would expect a region to be a standalone sizing.
So my point would ultimately be, if you want a mainstream theme then having the "option" of sidebars as opposed to regions (using the example above) then it would appeal to more people. The flipside of that is that you basically have to design multiple times to take into account the various layouts that are possible.
Great stuff to see some action on this front though, as a person coming from the same angle as you.. I've been saying I'm going to release something for ages now, and this has spurred me on to get back on it! thanks!
Dreamleaf Media
Normalized CSS
This was elluded to and if redundant please pardon. However, the theme (style.css) should contain normalization of Drupal's CSS for consistency. Also, the theme should aggregate all drupal generated css into one file.
Thanks and hope this helps.
if you want to see great themes
If you want to see great themes I suggest you to have a look to the ones by developmentseed.org such as Rubik (http://drupal.org/project/rubik), which is the best admin theme (and not only for the smart design) I've seen around. I think the goal is to combine design and flexibility: e.g. if you use Panels Everywhere (which means it will be a PE-compatible theme) you can provide several layouts for your page. From my point of view the theme should work also for the admin section (it won't be the main aim of the theme, but it will ensure consistency if anyone wants to use it for both purposes). In the README.txt you should explain which modules are required for your theme to work, but you must be sure that making your theme the default one won't break any website if the required modules have not been installed. A good starting point are D7 core themes requirements (http://drupal.org/node/769692: they suggest to support IE6 - "for now" - but I think a IE7+ contrib theme will be great anyway).
I'm a themer and imho often creating subthemes won't be enough flexible for users who wants to build their one website; furthermore probabily you'll end up having a DOM full of divs that you really don't need.
Ps: anyone knows how to submit a new theme to drupal.org?
Submitting a theme is easy,
Submitting a theme is easy, but first you have to complete a hew steps to get full project (developer) git access: http://drupal.org/node/1011698
Cheers,
Andrey
Free and Premium Drupal Themes | Drupal Sites Showcase. Add yours! | My Blog
All really good advice
Now, forget all about it again and think hard about what you want this to be. Then, do that. Define your vision for the design and stick to it. All the configuration bells and whistles are second to that.
I'm looking forward to the result!
Thanks for the feedback dudes
I've decided this would be better split between 2 contrib themes, 1 subtheme and 1 stadalone.
The reason behind this is after reading http://drupal.org/node/912458 I would ultimately like to get a design into the selection process for a core theme, even to get something into the selection process to be considered would be a personal triumph and this is where using a base theme will be a waste of my time.
I plan to release a few contrib themes this year so I have chosen a powerful but lightweight base theme that will allow me to be as flexible as possible with a heavily designed subtheme as that was my plan from the start and hence this thread being started. I like Jeff's idea about ditching a particular audience in genre and creating a "one size fits all" theme which I think will be the most fun and challenging to design.
So, thanks for the input and I should have something comped in the next couple of weeks which I'll want some feedback on.